Heres the RPG I was working on on the 86. Im going to port it to the 84+ and finish it.

. I have a few questions about the 84+. I would love to have a file documenting the memory, screen info, port info, interrupts, and all other technical data. Ive got the files off of TIs website for developers but its for the TI 83+, I cant find the TI84+s developers guide. How similar are these calcs and why make an 83+ and an 84+? Im tired right now, Ill finish this tomorrow. Ill explain the things in the video. And how do you make animated GIF's from an emulator?

They are generally the same, except for speed and memory. The TI-84+ series has a USB port and a real-time clock, but is otherwise identical to the TI-83+SE. I recommend http://wikiti.brandonw.net/ for hardware info.

For grayscale in TI-8X family I recommend graylib2 from James Montelongo. (you may find in RS forums or PM me) Or doing your own if you can.

One major modification are the graphics routines (mapper, sprites) because of the LCD size...

That looks great!  Out of curiosity, what are the little pixels moving around in your (radar?)?

Thanks for the info. I was really tired last night and crashed. I cant wait to get done with this game. Tonight I will test some stuff out and see where Im at on the calc programming. The circle in the upper right hand portion of the screen is a crystal ball that shows where the enemies are at. I took it from this old rpg on the snes. I just hate rpgs that have you battling an enemy every two steps. With the ball you can try to avoid enemies if your near death, and go after them when you want to gain money or experience. Its only up in there so i could test it out and make sure that the enemies actually come to you and not just aimlessly wander around. Its taking a long time to get the fighting part done because theres so many things i want to do with it, but trust me, when its done this game will be perfect. After that the rest of the game will go quick. Ive already made the majority of the routines to be used in it. I might have to change some things due to the resolution of the screen though. Another question though, is it possible to archive the map data? Ive read that it has to have an app header to go in there, but is there anyway possible to get around the ram memory limits? The world map alone is huge and the towns/caves are pretty big too. Can I store the map/sprite data in the archived area and readily retrieve it? And are there any small project requests that anyone has? I was reading about the teacher lock the calcs, has anyone found a way around that? If not I could look and see whats up with it.

Yeah, back in the days, I used to have my RPGs set so every step you have 20% chances to encounter an enemy. However, one single arrow keypress made you move an entire area away, kinda like Phantasy Star 1 dungeons on the Sega Master System, but in 2D. When I discovered the wonders of tilemapping and collision detections, I switched to 2% chances every step, but what happens when you hit under 3% 6 times in a row? pure annoyance, so here's what I do now: when game starts, I store a value from 10 to 50 in variable R. This is the amount of steps before next random encounter. After every battle, this counter is randomised again, even after boss fights. This reduces battles every step a lot. Of course you still can't see the enemies but it's much more bearable IMHO (and faster, since you doN't use Rand every step, which is slow in BASIC). With a radar it's even better, altough it needs ASM to be fast enough .

As for archived maps, it should be possible, you just need to learn how to deal with archived data. Usually, people will copy the needed map to a RAM area temporarly, while keeping the original program or file archived.

Another note, I recall the 86 using strings for ASM program storage, right? Or was it the 85? On the 83+/84+ we use 8xp files (programs), or FLASH apps, which are 8xk files. Keep in mind Flash APPs doesn't allow self-modifying code, though, so save data is saved in an external file, usually an appvar. Flash APPs are also coded a bit differently, IIRC, since it's divided into 16384 bytes pages. Chips Challenge, for example, is almost 10 pages large. The hard part can be to access data from a different page, but I'm not an expert at assembly so you would probably need to ask an ASM expert on either the forums or IRC.

This might be useful: http://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=Calculator_Documentation#TI-83_Plus_Family

But yeah, when doing ASM, you're not limited to just RAM. If you go with regular programs, you'll have to divide your game into multiple subprograms, with some of them being archived (usually the map data or stuff that is ran only a few times in a game, kinda like BASIC games that uses an ASM libs to copy archived programs in temp RAM programs). Otherwise, Flash APPs. I believe Flash APPs were not used for games when the 86 was still popular, though.

if you are talking about the teacher guard thing on teh calcs there was a way around it made that basically patches teh tios and makes it do nothing at all it just has the screen you hit ok nothing happens

if your talking about somthin else idk


also i love how this is coming so far and i like the crystal ball idea i hate it as well when u get into fight after fight after fight it made me have to restart final fantasy 2 from the begging cause i got stuck in a cave X.x

it's not green o.O?

Your computer screen might be dying or something , cuz the forum post areas are blue-ish

In my RPGs there's a trick about not running into any random battle that works in Illusiat 7, 10-13, ROL1-3, Mystique and Mana Force 2: unlike in the PS1 remakes of FFI-II NES, the amount of step before next random battle is not stored into save files. Basically this means if you save/reload your game every 9 steps (or 4 for dungeons with higher encounter rates) you won't encounter any enemy.