Thank you for reading the ticalc.org newsletter! The Program of the Month continues this month. Please note that the newsletter is no longer being sent exactly at midnight GMT. Rather, it is being sent a few hours later than that, which is midnight somewhere in the Atlantic ocean ;) We have changed the voting process slightly; it is now possible to vote on all programs which have been submitted during the past month. This was done to prevent bias and other problems with the nominations. There is now a nomination period of one week, followed by the actual voting for another week.

NOTE: Because of a major setback having to do with the PostgresSQL system, the nomination form will not be open when this newsletter is sent. A news item will be posted once the nomination form becomes available.

Kirk Meyer

Recently, on the Assembly 83 mailing list a member from the Hays Games Compan y sent word that the company has been defeated. Why? All of the major TI sites n o longer accept programs from them. This is not a bad thing, and they did this f or a good reason. You see, for a long time the Hays Games Company has copied gam es from real people who made games for the TI calculators. Only recently, thoug h have they learned to edit assembly programs and change them by putting their n ames in and taking the real authors' names out. Tetris Gold is an example of thi s. The Hays Games Company must be stopped at all costs. How are we going to acco mplish this? Do not download any of "their" programs (copies). And never talk ab out them any more. If you own a TI site do not add any of the Hays Games Company 's programs. Here is a list of all the games they copied so you know what not to download.

The real game is first, followed by the Hays copied game. Cham pionship Bowling, Fella Bowling; NBA Jam, NBA Hangtime; Baseball, Major League B aseball '98; Jackoff, Batman and Robin's MOM?; ZTetris, Tetris Gold; Duckhunt, D uckhunt 83; All Star Baseball, All Star Baseball '99; Race IV, San Francisco V; Screensaver 83, Hays Plus Screen Saver; ZCon83, Hays Plus Contrast Changer.

What else did they do to annoy the heck out of everyone? Their list of wrong doings includes Code Theft, Use of authors name, lying, and even home page hacki ng. It all started in a yahoo chat room, four of them were chatting and found out they each had TI-83's and wanted to use them to make money, so they founded the Hays Games Company. Their plan was to make it so that Hays Games Company owned all the archives and programs, and they actually charged people $1 per month so they would send you upgrades to your software. There were some problems however, and Bill Nagel to them was the main one. They were going to monopolize the TI-83 platform using these steps:

1. Get rid of Bill Nagel (at all costs);
2. Get on one TI site's good side;
3. Release quantity over quality;
4. Release new Doorways with 50+ programs at once;
5. Charge money for program upgrades.

They got as far as to step four, until something went wrong. Bryan Rabeler found out about their copies and deleted all of them. This was their first major set back. Then along came the New Programmers Order, which was founded by Chuck Taylor, one of their former members. Soon they had more enemies then they could handle, and had to hide out for awhile. They started a new company called Ellis Industries as a front to their operations while anti-Hays died down a bit. Then they came back, but the NPO had allied itself with a group called Z80-AC and took over their home page. After they made a new home page, Kirk Meyer informed them that ticalc.org, the last site to hold Hays Games Company programs, deleted all of their software and will not accept it anymore. They then knew they would never get further than step 3 in their plan for a TI-83 monopoly.

A lot of it sounds like another Microsoft. I hope this informs the people who didn't know so now our lives can be Hays free! Feel free to email me your comments!

EDITOR'S NOTE: Hays recently released "Grand Car Stealer 83" for the TI-83 listing me, Kirk Meyer, as the author. This is, of course, insane, since I haven't touched a TI-83 in my entire life.

(KSA)Tekken

In calculator news, a port of Diamonds has been released for the TI-86. Also ported to the TI-86 was Tetris Attack, which won our Program of the Month award for both the TI-82 and TI-83. For the TI-83, SOS v2.0 was released. Joe has also released some of the first ever programs specifically for the TI-83 Plus calculator.

On to site news, we proudly celebrated our third anniversary this past month. We announced the membership of Nick Disabato, who has integrated quite a few of the screenshots into our archives. Speaking of screenshots, we have the pleasure to announce that we now have the ability to quickly and easily take animated screenshots of calculator programs. You can expect to see animated screenshots soon of the more popular programs available.

10. The first thing that you do when you go online is check your favorite TI site to see what's new.

9. Whenever anybody says, "Is that an '89?", you think they mean a calculator and not a car model.

8. You've convinced your parents that graphing calculators are necessary for ALL subjects, not just math.

7. You have more than 10 link cables in your drawer that people have "accidentally" left with you.

6. You've bought one of those little adapters so that you can plug headphones into your calculator.

5. You talk about your calculator as an "investment" - sorry Jonah, that applies to you too :)

4. You are very passionate about debates such as TI-86 vs. TI-89 and Assembly vs. BASIC.

3. You really wish that you could have a clock built in to your TI calculator. Just because it'd be cool.

2. You can type at 30 words per minute, even on the non-QWERTY keyboard.

1. You show the girls at your school how you've put in this switch that makes your calculator run faster. You can't understand why they don't really seem to care.

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