Hi. I noticed Hayleia's BASIC snake game on the homescreen, and I wondered how fast it could be on the graphscreen.
Made this today while seeking Weregoose's snake game code for help. (He posted code to it a while ago, and I've used it since, but idk how to contact him about it.)
It uses a trick called the pathfinding tail eater. So no lists! :D Anyhow, here's the code, at 351 bytes:
Unfortunately, the snake is quite skinny due to me using pixels (necessary point-pixel usage to the pathfinding tail eater):

Oh lol, I thought it was homescreen from the pic. My bad for not reading your code, sorry!
Regarding lists... I don't believe it will cause a slowdown. But I'm running out of memory, after downloading every CSE program on ticalc. And each element taking up 9 bytes, something like 5,200 elements would overflow, being pixel based. (80*260/4 cuz I'm doing every other pixel). You don't have that problem because you're using text, and it can't get that big. But for the pro players on mine... ERR:OVERFLOW - so I don't use lists.

Yeah that looks pretty cool !

Yeah, I actually downloaded that and another snake game before being disappointed at them using lists. imo lists are only useful temporarily due to the 9 bytes per element issue due to supporting 14 digits and imaginary numbers etc. - most of which don't get used (usually only ints are stored in them). I wish TI made it custom strings rather than custom lists.
I'm not on Cemetech, but I'll try to see if I can find Weregoose there. (Does cemetech have PMs?)
This is really just a test for speed. I'm going to test his code from 1 end of the screen to another end and multiply the time by 3 to compare with mine. (I'm pretty sure 3 should be the factor between pts to pxls). If mine is faster, I might flush it out with highscrores, making it look better, showing the score, more features etc.

EDIT: No disrespect meant to any of those authors, I swear! I just meant to that lists slow things down even though they are useful, and I wanted to make a faster version without lists, but not necessarily with all the features a list can help make. Slower doesn't mean worse, but my goal here is speed. I wasn't attacking their work at all. Sorry for coming across as disrespectful to them.

1 byte int lists??!!?!?!? YES. That would be great. I usually use strings because they're just so much more memory efficient - lists temporarily during execution, then I translate them into strings for long term. Int arrays of 1 byte would be a dream come true.

I've dealt with that pretty easily in Axe by using 2 bytes to store it. Just multiply the first byte by 256 and add. And voila, you have a range of 16 thousand.

Oh wow... I would've expected numbers like 10,000, not 10,000,000. But more bytes = more space. It's a simple matter of multiplying by the base and adding. In BASIC, it's easy, right?

Any number that is <= 9000.

But in all seriousness, its great to see these little games coming out. It means that there is interest in the 84C and the more familiar people become with its capabilities, the more games we are going to see! .