Sadly, I don't own a TI-83 or TI-83 Plus (or any calculator other than a TI-89, for that matter), so I can't participate. I would love to try my hand at making an updated version of pong, but I don't have the right calculator.

There's nothing stopping you from making one for the 89. There just isnt a contest.

Is there no way to program on a Mac?!? I have some great ideas for an ap in this contest but all I have is a stinkin' Mac! Does anyone know how to program in Asm on a Mac?

Just use a text editor. :-) (j/k, sorta)

You need a text editor (easy enough), an assembler, and a TI variable creator (or loosely, a "linker").

If you can't get TASM to work, and you have OS X (if not, I can't help you), here is a short list of alternate (and free) assemblers you could probably use:

You could try the linking assembler that comes with the C compiler SDCC (http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/). You'd probably have to play with it a lot just to work with the TI calcs. I've played with and tried to modify the C compiler mostly, but it won't work well with TI calcs because it uses the IY register. Its license is the GNU GPL.

Another assembler is tpasm (http://www.sqrt.com/), which I've used and for which I've made a few small utilities and shell scripts to make TI-86 program variables (can be changed for TI-83(+)). My programs are essentially the "linker". I'm (Chris Williams) even in the Readme file for tpasm 1.2! Check it out! It's also under the GNU GPL.

The last assembler I'll write about here is z88dk's (http://www.z88dk.org/). It's another C compiler that comes with an assembler/linker and even supports several TI calcs. I haven't used this one, but it looks promising and I'll try it sometime. It's licensed under the Artistic License (free software).

I can upload or email you the small programs I wrote so you can use them if you want to use tpasm.

BTW, TASM is actually shareware, and I bet most of ticalc doesn't know that and haven't registered; I'm party guilty of that too, and that's why I've been looking for other assemblers to use.

Thanks a lot! But, I unfortunately have Mac OS 9.2. If I can get OS X, will these all work for TI-89 Programming?

No, these are for Z80-based calculators (82, 83(+(SE)), 85, 86). You can use TIGCC for MacOS X (in the Unix directory), and it comes with mostly everything you need to program for the TI-89/92+, including two different assemblers and a C compiler.

Is there no way to program in C for the 89 on Mac OS 9.2?

There are many of us that program on our TI's. If we could put that together into one big TI server, we could exchange programs, test them and run them on our servers.

TI has several languages: Basic, Assembly, Hex, Flash, Ion, and Binary. These languages are what makes up programs.

Programming cool stuff on these languages must be cool. We could build servers using Ion, Hex, Binary, and Assembly. We would have Basic Programs on our TI's and Flash to get us connected to the server.

What do you think about my idea?

1st of all - Hex + binary are just 2 different ways of expressing ASM commands

2nd - Ion is just an ASM shell (but not _just_ an ASM shell)

3rd - Flash is just ASM stored in a different memory type

4th - BASIC is way to slow for a server

This is like the worst time it could happen. I had programmed a BASIC 2-player PONG system, but I deleted it! Why me?

_
/^\