Ok. And one last question. How would I draw the text I want to the back buffer, and have it remain black, as the rest is gray?

Grayscale works by changing pixels on and off repeatly. you see this as gray.
You can do grayscale this way:

Code: [Select]

ClrDraw(radians)     >next time, i use (r)
Pause 100   (to prevent the program fron shutting down immediately)
Repeat getKey
ClrDraw(r)
Pt-On(Xpos,Ypos,[FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
DispGraph(r)
End
This displays a grayscale square somewhere on the screen (put an X and Y position in)
You can do this for the whole image, but also for a part of it
If you want a part not being gray, simply don't put a (r) after the Pt-On

I hope that this short tutorial is useful for you.

It does, but the code is only showing black.

I got it working.

I have failed to produce a good splash screen for Zelda. I still do not understand how to utilize the greyscale in Axe. I would like a splash screen that says "Legend of Zelda", "Ganon's Rage", and potentially has an image of the triforce. I don't care how many layers of greyscale it is. I would rather it be done by someone who has succeeded in using Axe grayscale before, but if someone teaches me how to do it, that would be cool too.

In a game map, if you need a edit the value of a tile on the fly, like a piece being collected, and you want to replace it with the value 00h, would you do

E00->tile  or   [00]->tile

the E represents the hex->dec token.

I have no experience with designing a good AI system, yet my Zelda game requires one. If someone would be willing to design such a routine, that would be great. In the AI, enemies must simply move toward the player and attempt to collide with you for damage. The enemies must rebound to the next impassable tile if they hit you or you hit them. If there is an item in the room some of them should move to protect the item, but this is optional. There are a few specifications as to what tiles an enemy may pass over and what tiles and enemy must move around. The game is coded in Axe, so an Axe routine would be great, but if someone would do it as assembly, I could use it as an inline assembly routine. Thanks in advance. I am making quick progress on the movement engine and tile-related event scripts.

Sorry DJ. I'm even more sorry if I was part of your reason for leaving. Hopefully you'll return soon.

Here is the draft of the letter I will distribute to teachers. Let me know what you guys think:



To the teachers,


It is important for everyone to be brought up to speed on the present situation. The TI-calculator community is composed up of three main groups. They are the teachers, the lay-users, and the programming community. Of those two, the ones that give Texas Instruments the most business are the teachers and the programmers. By encouraging your students to get calculators from Texas Instruments, instead of from its competitor, Casio, you drive sales for TI up enormously. The programming community is the next leading group in terms of business for TI. Whether it be because we have destroyed the programming of our calculator beyond repair, or because we just want to try out new hardware, we also purchase a lot from TI.

I am unaware where the stigma of programming being a hinderance comes from, but it seems to be present in all teachers of the appropriate fields; that programming one's calculator is, not only a waste of time, but also a keen way to cheat on exams. I will grant that many students do not care at all about the merits of calculator programming and use programs to store cheats, but to embrace just this one group of students as the reason "spoils the bunch", so to speak. There are many of us out there who use programming not to cheat, but rather to hone in on one's own skills and to grasp a higher understanding of the topics presented.

First off, let me define a program. A program is a series of instructions given to a computational device that cause it to carry out certain tasks. The nature of a program, when constructed as such, is not to cheat. I have always been taught that the best test of whether or not you understand the material is to see if you can do it yourself. But, what better indication is there that you know the material so well than that you can give a calculator fool-proof instructions on how to carry out a given calculation, have it explain why that calculation was made, and account for margins of error.

If that is not convincing enough, allow me to present this. I myself will admit to having used pre-made programs on tests in the past. Not for reference on information, but merely for computational assistance…the ability to perform multiple calculations at once. On average, I performed the same, if not worse, on the exam, leading me to the conclusion that regardless of what you bring into the test, not even a program can help you if you do not know the material. All the program does is help you answer the question faster, if you already know what to do. I currently have a case study of this underway, in a larger scale, and will present my findings to the community. If you are interested in the result, create an account on my website, http://www.c2prgm.webs.com. That will allow you to view the "Teacher's Section", where the results, and software made for teachers will be placed.

Then, there is the issue of gaming. One of the chief arguments against playing games on calculators that I have heard is that they mess around with the lists (L1 through L6), which are used by the calculator to graph regressions, as well as other system variables. The truth: Very few calculator games actually interfere with important data used in class. In fact, 95% of the games I have reviewed create their own storage locations, and then destroy them once they are no longer needed. This takes away strength from the most powerful downside to games: students play games during class. Well, outlawing games on calculators does not solve the problem, as students will just find other ways to not pay attention. The fact is that you need to trust your students to have the maturity to say "there is a time and a place for everything, and class is not the time for playing games".

I have heard that Texas Instruments holds conventions for teachers, and at these conventions they speak about the programming community. Judging by the industry's treatment of our support requests, it I can assume that their statements about us are negative. Well, here is the truth about TI. TI releases new software that is (1) buggy (means prone to crashes and other errors; in fact the TI-84+ OS 2.55MP is known to have crashed while calculating 1+1.), (2) designed to cause incompatibility with our programs, such as xLib, Omnicalc, and others, and (3) contains no new features. Many members of our community have contacted TI about why they design these new, pointless features, while their older ones still still don't work properly. We have gotten the run-around, links to the documentations that do not address our questions, or just completely ignored. All the while, they claim to support educational advancement.

As if that isn't bad enough, TI has posted takedown orders against several more prominent members of our community, who have reverse-engineered key parts of TI's operating system software. We have used this information to port our own OS software and run it on our own calculators; we have not used this information to edit or redistribute TI's software and claim it as our own. Instead, we use it to fix the mistakes that TI refuses to. Yet that did not stop TI from attacking our members for copyright infringement. To my knowledge, at least one of these cases went to court, and a judge threw out the case. Yet, TI tells you, the teachers of the world, that we have warped priorities. Well, we aren't the ones who spend money filing cases against innocent software developers, instead of producing better equipment.


Signed proudly,

Anthony Cagliano
-TI calculator software designer
-member of omnimaga.org and cemetech.net