Vertical Text Sprites are a really great way to display large sprites on the screen.  I use this method for displaying the main menu graphic in Elmgon.  (This screenie is shown below, but those who have seen my first post my Elmgon topic have sceen it.)

The idea behind vertical text sprites is to keep the bottom row of text of the text command before it.  You can see that with this code:
:Text(3,0,"....       //4 periods
:Text(2,0,"          //7 spaces
:Text(1,0,".     .  //Period, 4 spaces, period
:Text(0,0," ...    //Space 3 periods

Now after you've sceen this (This next part is for 84 users only) press Mode and run the code again.  Suddenly the bottom row dosn't show up.  This is because the Ti-OS has set a flag, and displaying any table (matrix editor or 2nd graph) will reset the flag.  You can reset the flag in basic:
:G-T
:DispGraph
:Full

The main characters used are the period (10) space (0) List L (111) and Left Bracket (110).  By using these and other combinations you can make any sprite. (except for the 3 right most pixels and top 6 pixels)  This is a lot bigger than RecallPic and slower, but because it dosn't use a Pic var, it's worth it.
A program and screenie of the program are included.  The program will not optomize, like 4 spaces becoming ^ for example.  You can use this link http://weregoose.unitedti.org/bottomrow/ (The link is now dead, so try here, here, or here instead.) to find the bottom row for every token.  (It is worth noting that the List L and Finance N do not have buffer spaces at thier ends in the small font.)

More info:
http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/textsprites#toc3

Enjoy.   (The program takes the row you want and encodes it, as you can see in the screenie.)

Edit:  After I wrote this, TI released OS 2.53 MP.  It messes with the flag so you can't reset it with G-T.  Instead, you must use a small Asm program with this hex code: FDCB058EC9  However, on the old (read: better) OSes you can use G-T.
Good luck with this great technique!

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prgmVRTXTSPR

I didn't know this technique. I only knew the Normal Horizontal Sprites with text...

I also didn't know that page in Weregoose site. It would be cool someone coded a utility to take a sprite or screen and convert to vertical text sprites...

I always loved how you display your title screen, altough I myself just don't get how it works . I am amazed at what basic programmers can do these days

I think I recall seeing a RPG from someone either on Omni or UTI that used horizontal text sprites once and it was quite slow indeed. It looked pretty cool, though.

I didn't try this one yet, even thought it's supposedly good, because for some reasons it still seems to bring me bad memories from stuff that happened on UTI before (with Darkerline and some others, altough I won't go into details)

I really need to check it, though, one day, cuz I am kinda curious and would like to see.

For a while I never understood the whole hype about Donut Quest. I always wondered what so special about this game and why it was so popular, but until like this summer, I thought it was only for 68k calculators. Now I still wonder about the popularity, so I think I'm definitively gonna try it now, cuz I'm really wondering what's so special about it. Again it might be hard for me to notice even after I play, because I do not like puzzle games as much as RPGs and action games

EDIT: I guess the game is not that bad and is a good example of horizontal sprites, but I didn't continue far because I can't even solve the first puzzle (no way to pick the keys to the right, cuz there's no space to go behind them to push them to the left)

It's my one of favorite games because it's so hard.  DJ, there is a way, but it takes about 30 minutes to figure out (or did for me).  I was stuck on the 7th ( of 8 ) level for 2-3 months before I beat it.  The whole game took me about 6 months.

Builderboy, you loved that puzzle (the key one) so much it's in Trapped.

On a related topic, what would you use for columns for horizontal text sprites that don't have a 3x5 token starting with that column? For example, what if you had a text sprite that absolutely had to have a column of 11001?