Did you ever see Jim E's pokémon demo? It was very similar in style to yours, smoothscrolling but aligned to a grid (only his was 16x16, not 8x8). He had a quick way of filling in/shifting the screen. I'm not sure how you handle it, but in asm it's pretty easy just to shift the whole screen one (or two) pixels to the left shifting in the missing pixels from a buffer with the last shift of the row of pixels. I guess with grayscale you'll have to do it for two buffers, but it's still much quicker than redrawing the map. That way you can also have a very optimised map routine since your sprites will all be aligned, you can just ldir (copy) them directly without needing to use any special sprite routine to handle shifting, etc.

You might want to talk to Kerm about adding that option, MirageOS had it, and i can't imagine it would be difficult to implement (basically just don't call the code to copy the program back into archive). I don't know how Axe programs are handled, but how do you know none of the routines use SMC? Or is there a compile-time option to use only non-SMC routines? Many routines use SMC because it's generally faster and smaller than loading content from locations in SafeRAM, and for some things it's hard to imagine how to go about it without using SMC.

Resetting your RAM isn't usually a big deal, your programs will all be archived and it's a small price to pay (losing unarchived lists/graph variables/etc.) for what it offers, i think I can't help you apart from keep trying and are you sure you the download is good? I used the TI-GraphLink for as long as i could (until i got a laptop that had no serial port), TI Connect always seemed pretty buggy to me. I don't know how difficult it is to set up TILP under Windows, but it could also be worth a try.

What do you mean? MirageOS has an interrupt (i think it's [ON]+[MODE]) that quits directly to the homescreen, though depending on how large the program is (and if it's in archive) it might take a couple seconds to do that. There's also [ON]+[CLEAR] to directly quit the program to the MirageOS shell main menu. Or did you want something that hides your programs (a fake reset) so that your teacher thinks you have nothing on there?

And just a personal opinion: If you want to pay attention or not in class is up to you. If you think you shouldn't play games in class that's fine, but personally i don't see anything wrong or immoral about it. The worst that will happen is that your grades drop, and that's a personal decision I played games all through middle school and high school and don't regret it one bit. The value of a high school class is pretty subjective, besides.

As for other games, there are tons of amazing games out there. Mario was always a lot of fun, and before that, Sqrxz, Phoenix (the classic), or even Phantom Star (a sort of spiced-up Phoenix), Pacman, Amidar which is like Pacman but i think more fun (it has some extra features like jumping), James Vernon's new Alien Breed 5 (or even version 3 or 4, for that matter), etc. There are plenty of great games!

I started converting it to an app since it's just too big to fit comfortably in RAM (and it lets me have a big buffer in RAM ).

Another really good (amazing, possibly the best) RPG is Robot War by DigiTan. I started porting it to the 83+ but haven't finished it. I'm not sure how much of it will play but it's very likely that it'll crash and you'll lose your savegame.

So i wrote out a little routine to calculate all of that and it worked nicely, i realized later that the problems with my first routine weren't (completely) due to that part of the code but rather an error in the main draw/update coordinates loop where i had reused 'd' to set some other registers to 0 when 'd' wasn't 0. After that i rewrote another routine which ignores X velocity (it's always +/- BULLET_SPEED) but is much faster (no square root, only one multiplication/division call) and i think works fine enough

EDIT:

Thanks, i figured that out later. I was confusing dX/Y with velX/Y.