Fully redrawing the map each frame is generally a bit to slow for the calculator. You're correct to suggest the shifting method to speed it up, and you were also correct to note the issue of sprites that don't move with the background.

The usual solution to this problem is to render only the map to a separate pair of screen buffers, allowing you to use the shift and minimal redraw method without worry, and copy the map to the main pair of screen buffers each frame before rendering sprites.

Why can't they be 9 pixels high? It's not much harder to draw an 8x9 sprite than an 8x8 sprite.

Can Axe compile multi page apps?

Nope. It would require either that the compiler implement a significantly more complicated memory model or that a bunch of the built-in routines be rewritten in more complicated, and thus larger and slower, variants. It seems unlikely that either of these things will be happening, at least any time soon.

I know of a few "solutions" to the application size limit:

• Optimize your code. There are lots of small tricks to save a few bytes here and there, but you'll get the biggest savings by first seeking out code that looks bloated or has a lot of redundancy. If you spot any such sections and want help optimizing them, you can post them here and I'm pretty confident someone will help.
• Move data out into appvars. The best candidates are data that doesn't need to be accessed often/rapidly, like map or string data.
• [Advanced] Use the PageSwap Axiom (tutorial) to manually emulate a multi-page application.

For those saying I neglected to mention Fullrene: I chose to leave it off because it's proven to be a bit unreliable and doesn't even offer much more space (logarithmically speaking) than an application does.

@Alex Twigg You don't really need to install Axioms, just send them to your calculator and include them in a program with #Axiom(NAME) (really the AsmComp() token). As for a tutorial, it's a bit short and out of date, but the one included with Axe, called Documentation.pdf, is still one of the best. There's also an exhaustive, up-to-date command list called Commands.html.

But the most exhaustive tutorial by far, made by kindermoumoute and Matrefeytontias, is available here (you may need to make a free account to see it). However, it is in French, so you either have to know French or try your best to deciper what an online translation service makes of it. If you use Chrome, you can translate a page by right-clicking and selecting "Translate to English." And I'd recommend still looking at the original French version for some things, like code blocks, because the translation process screws up some formatting.

While there are no OS functions to rename a variable in RAM, it is possible to do manually with a bit of work. However, it is not possible* to rename a varaible in ROM, since the VAT entry is duplicated in ROM, which cannot be modified.


* Technically possible, but to do correctly would involve a fair amount of manual flash operations essentially equating to a full user archive space defragmentation. There are probably only a couple of assembly programmers who could even pull this off.

I looked at the source of that command and confirmed that it performs no port modulation if the second argument is less than the first. You might just be picking up on noise.

Axe Libraries

2D

• Bezier Curves : Draws Bezier curves.
• YAAM : Somewhat flexible scrolling 2D tilemapper.

Grayscale

• ★ GrayLib ★ High-quality interrupt-based grayscale and supporting commands like improved masked grayscale sprite and grayscale text drawing.

UI

• Input Routine : Get user input with a text box.

Math

• 3-Byte and 4-Byte Libraries : Add, subtract, and display 3-byte or 4-byte (unsigned) integers.
• ★ Zedd Physics Library ★ Flexible 2D physics library.
• 3D Collision Detection : Handle collisions in a 3D world. Designed with gLib in mind as the rendering engine.

OS Interfacing

• Clock Library : Read and write the time and date available on the 84+.

Axioms

2D

• Advanced Graphics : Draw filled (black, white, or inverted) circles.
• Text Routines : Draw text to arbitrary buffers and convert values to strings.
• Scaled Sprites Axiom : Draw scaled sprites with OR or XOR logic.

3D

• AxeJH3D : 3D math, projection, and rendering.
• ★ gLib ★ 3D math, projection, and rendering.

External Interfacing

• Calcnet Axiom : Interface with Calcnet.
• USBpad8x : Make the calculator act as a USB keyboard.

Hardware

• LCDKit : Extra LCD control and direct reading/writing.
• SpeedKey : Read the state of the arrow keys as a single number.

Math

• ★ Floating Point Math ★ Execute just about any mathematical or variable manipulation operation provided by the OS.
• Vector Axiom : 3D vector math.

OS Interfacing

• RunPrgm : Run external assembly programs, which may be archived.
• Detokenize Axiom : Detokenize strings of tokens (like those returned by the input command) and a few related commands.
• Alphabetical Memory Kit : Read VAT (Variable Allocation Table) information and traverse it alphabetically with optional filtering by variable type.

Source Management

• ★ Pucrunch Decompression ★ Decompress Pucrunch-compressed data. Includes a Windows compression utility.
• ★ Fullrene ★ Enable execution of programs with more than ~8KB of code. May not work on 83+.
• PageSwap : Control the memory page mapped to the $4000-$7FFF space. Allows rough emulation of multi-page applications. (Tutorial)

UI

• DCS Axiom : Interface with DCS's GUI stack.
• AxiomGUI : Simple GUI stack that supports a cursor, modal alerts, buttons, and progress bars.
• Menu Axiom : Display OS-style menus

On-Calc Tools

Spriting

• ★ tileIt! ★ Monochrome and grayscale 8*8 tileset and tilemap editor designed with Axe in mind.
  

Utility

• ★ zStart ★ Run/edit archived programs, jump to labels, compilation hotkeys, accidental line clear undo, and much, much more. (Small font editor beta)

Off-Calc Tools

Emulation

• ★ Wabbitemu ★ Windows-based emulator. Best animated screenshot creating capability, among other strengths.
• ★ jsTIfied ★ Browser-based emulator.

IDE

• SourceCoder : Browser-based TI-BASIC editor and image converter. Directly links with jsTIfied.
• ★ TokenIDE ★ Windows-based TI-BASIC editor with an Axe token set and sprite/image editor. Works on Linux with Mono.
• IES : Browser-based TI-BASIC editor with an Axe token set and simple picture editor.

Spriting

• Pixelscape : Browser-based monochrome and grayscale 8*8 tileset and tilemap editor designed with Axe in mind. Compatible with tileIt!

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If you believe any library, Axiom, or tool should be added to this list, let me know.

In Axe, you basically can't. There's a reason the Y₁-Y₀ "file" system exists, after all. Why would you be trying to avoid them?

Also, if you are going to use them, note that you can read and copy from pointers to archived data, but nothing else. For instance, you can't directly draw a sprite because the sprite drawing routine doesn't "know" how to read archived data, which isn't nearly as straightforward to read as data in RAM. And you can't write to a pointer to archived data simply because that's a limitation of the hardware. Writes to flash memory have to be done in a very special manner which is far too expensive and complicated to do arbitrarily.