Woo hoo.

Great choice. You will not be disappointed! 

The TI-89 is a great choice. I prefer the earlier models over the Titanic -- errr I mean Titanium.

And if you want to appease the wrath of Ranman and help revive the 68K scene, go for the TI-89s!

Well... You got some good points Deep.

I personally love the 68K calcs. 188Kb RAM available to user -- no page swapping, native support of 32 bit integers, 68K BASIC is very powerful (still slow), 68K assembly is easy, and powerful C support. And you get decenct LCD specs (160x100 TI89, 240x128 92+/V200)

For Z80 calcs: their BASIC is powerful but slow as well, Z80 assembly is not as straightforward, limited RAM requiring page swaps. These limitations can be fun to work with though. And now you have... Axe which is pretty darn cool!

For nSpires: not too sure about these bad boys. Great LCD resolution. LUA programming language -- since I am a C/C++ guy, I dont care for Lua.

You could go for a Casio 9860 or Casio Prizm. 9860s have good LCDs specs, 64Kb RAM, BASIC and C languages available. Prizms sound like a middle ground between 84/89 series and the nSpire.

My next calc may indeed be a Prizm.

Ranman runs again

It is a DS Lite. It appears to be charged. Usually if it is low on charge the orange light comes on and blinks. Right now when I power it on, the green light comes on but the screens are black (with or without a cartridge in).

As the unit degraded but before the screens went solid black, the screens would light up and show the Nintendo screen -- even without a cartridge. With a cartridge plugged in, the game would play for a few seconds then freeze up. But now... nothing but the green and orange lights work.

Thanks for all the comments. I'm hoping it is just a bad battery.

PROGRESS UPDATE!!!

I just broke the game

I'm going to have to start all over!!!

My AI algorithm went bonkers when I first ran it, and now I lost the code (my fault) and have to start over again from the latest update on.

So sorry to hear this. That has got to be very frustrating. I hope you don't let it discourage you -- the game looks magnificent!

Start:

€20,- (€10 discount)
Snes, controllers and power supply in near mint condition. The games are complete and the Secret of Evermore came in a large box with a detailed strategy guide/artbook.

Nice!!! I never saw that version of the SNES before.

I got Ultima V for PC MSDOS for $1 -- originally $70 in 1988.

Quick update:

Took a break from creating levels to work on other aspects of the game.

- removed the levels from the main program
- created an external "level pack" file
- compressed the external level pack
- modified main program to open, decompress, and read the level pack
- added capability to save high scores to a file in archive memory
- modified main program to open & read high scores file

To do in this area:
- add a screen to select one of many level packs to play