This news item was posted at 3am GMT. I don't think that qualifies as "this evening". :)

. . . and I take back my replay to Nick's comment above. Apparently we CAN always find a minor error in the article =)

Depends where Nick is in relation to the GMT line.

He's in Central Time (US). Right now, he's 5 hrs behind GMT. So, it was posted at 8 PM his time.

Right, but that doesn't matter. :) The site uses GMT, not Central Time.

Stop complaining. You *always* have to come in here and make some snide remark or another. Just stop. We don't care that you think everything that ticalc.org members say should be consistant with the sites "official time zone". Really, it doesn't matter at all. You should just stop nitpicking and go to dim-ti or something. You're really starting to get on my nerves.

Haha.

<sarcasism>

Stop nitpicking everything I say. Frankly, we don't care that you think every that I say is nitpicking. You should just stop nitpicking and go to ti-files or something. You are really getting on my nerves.

</sarcasism>

:)

(PS - If you can't take a joke, don't reply to this comment.)

Ok, Ahmed stated this
"Okay guys. I have not read the message boards much, nor have I really posted anything at all... however, after recieving many emails asking me why I am punishing the "good" people who don't flame me for those who do flame me... and many flames, and still yet many others supported me in my boycotting of the 83+ ports, telling me that it is a totally reasonable thing to do."

As I see it, there are two sides in conflict here: The 83+ newbies and the 83users and other calulators. Now, these "newbies" may not know too much about caculators, yet. So they constantly whine about not having x,y, and z. Can we really blame them? Are they now new and fresh and only "banning" 83+ ports will create more problems then needed. They are, new...shouldn't we welcome them into our community? And let them forge their own way into this world? Yet, we continue to disparge the growing group, who will dominate in the coming months.
The second group I see is the old users, those who own 86, 82, and so on. This groups has_all_the_games already and it is not likely they would whine about ports. The main reason they might oppose the 83+ is simple bigotry. It may not really matter, but people are bias over anything. They don't want all the programmers porting for the 83+, they rather have more games for themselves, and add their plethora of games. With the induction of the 83+, it created a slight ripple amongst the TI community...
On a third note, hasn't this situation happened every time there has been a new calculator? I remember when the 89 came out and everyone begged for ports and games. NOw they have them and there are few whines now. As you can see, there seems to be a slight partisan towards any other calculator than the 83+. Why is it getting picked on?

Well, you can ask the same question with macs, why don't programmers program for macs? Huh? Huh? Why did quake come out for makes like 3 years after it came out for pc's... why? Because pc's are more flexible, more people have them!!! The TI-86 can emulate most TI-82/85 games now fairly accurately, so people programming for the 82/85 know that 86 users can use their games too!!! 83+'s are basically TI-83's with spunk and a lot of programmers who worked so hard to get their prgms out on the 83 don't want to spend more time porting the same old thing to the +... it's simply boring!

What the hell is everybody's problem with somebody porting games??? If games were never ported, you probably wouldn't have any good games at all! Drugwar- ported from PC. Tetris- ported from Nintendo. Nibbles- ported from somewhere, but it certainly did not originate on a TI calculator! Think about what you are all flaming Ahmad for!!! I mean, you people (I'm referring to those of who who pissed him off) who made him halt programming will be sorry if when you buy a TI-9million and there are no good games for it. So know your role, and shut the hell up. Let him program games if he wants to. If you don't like it, don't download it, god dammit!

Some people don't like their "creations" messed with.

Just to point something most of you already know, there's quite a bit of difference between the porting discussed in the article and what's described in this comment. The people who "port" Tetris from its original to the calculator have to write the entire program from scratch. The same goes for porting between Z80 and 68K calculators. Even though the idea is copied, none of the code is. On the other hand, porting games from other TI-83 shells to TI-83+ is much easier since they are very similar. This requires far fewer changes, since they have the same processor and screen layout, and system data and routines are similar. Porting between a TI-85/86 and TI-82/83 is somewhere in between in difficulty, because the screen routines need to be changed, and some of the system stuff is quite different, but still most of the code can be kept in that situation.

I just think that in all the TI-83+ this, 86 that arguing, all of us TI-85 owners are missing out on new and great games that will fit and are possible to work on an 85...

Such as howza bout Subhunt 85, Lazer85, etc.

So that you can not say I'm just as bad as the whinning 83+ people, this is not an order. I'm just daying don't forget them. It's great to have universal games and not ignore others. But if you don't want to, then don't. Don't say you can't becuase I asked.

CURRENT BETA TESTER OF:

Mortal Kombat 86 (The 86 I'm using is not mine)
Pac-Man '99 v3.0 (This Version doesn't screw Sqrxz)

Beta Tester needed anybody?

I for one, can understand where Ahmed is comming from. Although I love the TI community, it can be, at times, a double edged sword. For instance:

When someone is working on a very popular project, they are nearly "forced" to finish it with a lot of (to much, actually) "Is it done yet?" "Why isn't it done yet?" "Can I play a demo?" "It's not done yet?"

This tends to cause the programmer or team to release the finish product without taking the time to fully tweak it out. Not to say that this happends 100% of the time, but it happends a lot. The effect of this is that those same people who begged and begged for the product now complain (alot) that the product is heavily bugged, flawed, or just plain sucks. We, as programmers, really don't like to hear this. There is reporting a bug, and then there saying the program sucks because it's buggy.

On the flip side of the coin, if one tries to take the time to fully tweak, clean and test a project as much as possible, we get flagged on taking "to long" to finish the project.

This is not the first time this has happened to this extent. Bill Nigel, a great programmer, got flagged heavily for problems with Super Mario that he created about a year ago. It was obvious that he spent countless hours on writing that code, but some people just didn't care, or appreciate his effort. Ahmed was correct in saying that we don't get paid for this, we do this because we love it and would like to contribute to the TI community. But it doesn't help much when this same community flags us for not being 100% perfect.


-TimeCr0ss

You know, out of all the new 83+ owners, there will be some programmers in there who will then make games for the 83+.

I know ports of other games are great and all, but expecting a programmer to port to a calculator he doesn't even own is asking too much. People bring up which calcs are better for this reason or that, but you know that's not how a programmer decides which platform to make the game on. He programs for the calc he owns. A programmer with no TI-89 isn't going to say "gee, this calc has the most memory, so I'll make a TI-89 game." So saying things like "Why don't these programmers stop making games for the TI-83 and start making them for the TI-83+ since it's a better calculator?" is just dumb.

Soon enough there will be programmers for the 83+ and then it will be all good.

-Justin

Actually, I think most programmers with any interest in ticalc programming alreadey had them. Now, somebod who isn't already a programmer might learn BASIC in order to use the calculator more effectively (as a friend of mine did) but ASM is a lot harder and it takes somebody who really wants to learn it for the sake of /it/. It is highly unlikely that that many ppl will emerge for this new format who are not already veterans of the others.
<jest> Oh, and I totally disagree with Nick. I don't want to click here for more information. Why couldn't you have written a nice, thoughtful sentence like, "If you want more information, click here?" :) You ti nerds, always writing buggy programs, always writing buggy sentences. And let's not even bring up that whole "this evening" thing again.</jest>
Ah, and I think the 86 has a buggy random nunber generator. Either that or my German sucks. A friend of mine from Switzerland has a magic 8-ball program on his calculator and it told me I was going to die yesterday.

What did it say? (auf Deutsch)
die yesterday, huh? Or wait? wouldn't you have died on the 18th?

>What did it say? (auf Deutsch)
Auf Deutsch habe ich ihn gefragt: "Wird ich heute totgeschlagen bin?"
Und er hat gesagt: "logo" (=="logisch")
I asked that, I believe, on the 18th. At any rate, the day before I wrote that post, my time, so by GMT I asked the question on the 18th. The actual question and answer were in terms of "today"

agreed.

I get my fairshare of newbiemail just from running a hosted site on ticalc.org, and then I question why don't they save themselves the time of waiting for a response from me, when the answer is in front of them... literally. "readme.txt" ? Seems elusive to many. Then there's things that aren't obvious, or things you just discover accidently... that's the stuff I don't expect people to understand when I put it up... But email like "how do I send [program] to my calc?" "how do I use zip files?"... just a real turnoff, from calcs to the TI-community in general.

In regards to porting, I'm starting to discover the situations programmers feel. A friend of mine and I are porting HicQuest in BASIC, to 68k std c++ console at school in AP CompSci... we're bored obviously, and we want to learn more. :) But there's ppl in class already demanding that we give them the program to run it... even though, it's not even 30% complete and could use tons of optimizations that C++ just owns BASIC for all it's worth. Gets annoying... but I just tell em it's not even close to ready. The fight function's not even done... and I've still gotta create the ifstream/ofstreams and yada yada yada. :> But as most programmers do, we code it simply because we want to. And I want to learn more in regards to C++, so what better way than to explore new territory? :)

-alan

The problem is like you say, some people just give up to quick, withough even looking at the readme files.

On another note I want to thank Ahmed, and the other programers who have released these new TI-83+ programs. I think you are taking a step in the right direction.