|
The ultimate game console in clandestine gaming during class: the Texas Instruments' graphing calculators. The TI-83, TI-84, and TI-89 were the weapons of choice against boredom during downtime in math class when I was in high school.    The calculators are also the reason I chose my career in programming, so I guess they are pretty near and dear to my heart, high up on the enemies list. There were a bunch of games available, and just seeing what was possible was always really exciting. There was some ice-climber-like game, a side-scrolling space shooter game, Doom - of course!, and so many more I can't even remember. At some point, I learned enough TI-Basic that I made Tic-Tac-Toe!  It seems the more modern games are far more advanced: https://www.ti84calcwiz.com/ti84plusce-games/ Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Oct 16, 2022 |
#
?
Oct 16, 2022 12:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 12, 2024 19:27 |
|
|
My favorite was the drug dealer game. Spend all your money on heroin then just keep traveling around until addicts but at outrageous prices and you are good to go!
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2022 12:37
|
|
|
I remember now! I kept thinking the word "phoenix", but I finally remembered - that was the name of the spaceship game! You could buy upgrades for you ship in between levels. It was really fun. Now I don't remember if it was side-scrolling or vertical. Or if it had bosses? I think it did. I found the game online! https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/148/14876.html It seems someone working at Berkley made it. And they made it completely open-sourced! Nice! Edit: Looking through the games listed on this site, I see some really crazy entries. They had Harvest Moon available in 2004?! Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Oct 16, 2022 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
Am I misremembering, or was it possible to play multiplayer tetris against someone else using a cable?
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2022 20:47
|
|
|
Are Casio users allowed to post ITT?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 02:38
|
|
|
~Coxy posted:Are Casio users allowed to post ITT? Banned from school due to TI monopoly, sorry.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 02:52
|
|
|
~Coxy posted:Are Casio users allowed to post ITT? As long as you got all your practice problems done already. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 09:34
|
|
|
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 11:07
|
|
|
You know, I was going to say that kids these days probably have no idea what a graphing calculator is as it's a relic of technology from a very specific period of time. Except don't they still use the same drat calculators as we did 25 years ago?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 16:23
|
|
|
yeah most schools that I know of still absolutely require a TI-89 for advanced math classes. and some even require that TI NSPIRE thing with the full color display. no idea why, I was not good at math in school so I never took any of those classes
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 16:27
|
|
|
Wow, huh, literally a 24 year old calculator. I don't think a TI-89 was required by anything but I did buy one as it was immensely useful at the time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 16:30
|
|
|
Shadow0 posted:I remember now! I kept thinking the word "phoenix", but I finally remembered - that was the name of the spaceship game! You could buy upgrades for you ship in between levels. It was really fun. Now I don't remember if it was side-scrolling or vertical. Or if it had bosses? I think it did. Reading through tutorials and source on ticalc.org was how I learned Z80 assembly, because I had too much free time in high school. I'm not sure if Phoenix or Galaxian came first, although they were made at least partially by the same guy, Patrick Davidson: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/38/3829.html I had a binder with the source code to a bunch of games printed out, and I would take notes in the margins. Wild stuff. DeadFatDuckFat posted:Am I misremembering, or was it possible to play multiplayer tetris against someone else using a cable? ZTetris: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/94/9489.html I never made a game that used the cable, and I would have done an awful job of it at the time, but it was pretty fun to figure out how they did it. I remember one game that used the cable port as a headphone jack and sent basic square wave pulses over it to make sound. It worked!
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 16:39
|
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:You know, I was going to say that kids these days probably have no idea what a graphing calculator is as it's a relic of technology from a very specific period of time. Except don't they still use the same drat calculators as we did 25 years ago? The US has mostly decided that the TI-84 is as powerful a calculator you can allow students without too easily trivializing trig and early calculus. Therefore, every student has an 83 or 84.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 19:05
|
|
|
barnold posted:yeah most schools that I know of still absolutely require a TI-89 for advanced math classes. and some even require that TI NSPIRE thing with the full color display. no idea why, I was not good at math in school so I never took any of those classes I got a TI-83 at the beginning of high school and I remember my father commenting that it was slightly better specced than what he had on his desk when he started his job at Bell Labs in 1982. The TI-89 is about the same specs as the original Macintosh from 1984. The fact that it's still being sold and required (!) over 20 years later has got to be one of the biggest scams going. For over $100 there's absolutely no reason for it to be so humorously underpowered. From the looks of it (I've never used one) the NSPIRE at least has a color display and rechargeable batteries. I know that there are some regulations about not having a QWERTY keyboard for standardized tests, which is vaguely reasonable even if misguided (you can still get FAST on a calculator keyboard, trust me) but you could run circles around a TI-89 with the cheapest Raspberry Pi knockoff.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
Not gonna go into too much detail because I could doxx myself but I contributed to TIGCC when I was in high school because the idea that I could write C programs for my calculator was the coolest thing imaginable
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 20:03
|
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:The US has mostly decided that the TI-84 is as powerful a calculator you can allow students without too easily trivializing trig and early calculus. The calculator manufacturers have a lot to do with this state of affairs.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 20:39
|
|
|
strtj posted:I got a TI-83 at the beginning of high school and I remember my father commenting that it was slightly better specced than what he had on his desk when he started his job at Bell Labs in 1982. The TI-89 is about the same specs as the original Macintosh from 1984. The fact that it's still being sold and required (!) over 20 years later has got to be one of the biggest scams going. For over $100 there's absolutely no reason for it to be so humorously underpowered. requiring a specific model TI graphing calculator is one of the greatest scams of all time, i'm with you 100%. the excuse of "oh it's an SAT/AP/ACT requirement" is complete horseshit. i had a TI-30XIIS and it was lovely (obviously not a graphing calculator though). if i had been forced to go to my parents and tell them "hey, you need to cough up $150 for a loving calculator" it would have been a bad time lol the huge scam was that you'd have one math class in high school that absolutely required one of these, then you'd have a chemistry/physics teacher who would categorically refuse to allow you to use them because you could pre-program formulas into them. so you'd have to go out and buy a $150 calculator, then you'd have to go out and buy a second $30 calculator just to be able to use it for that one class. not sure how they got away with that 20 years ago, these days i'm pretty sure parents would be waiting in the parking lot for that teacher i was lucky enough to have the other physics teacher in my school, one who lived by the mantra "your boss is never going to tell you that you can't look something up" so he would allow us to bring in as many notesheets for exams as we wanted as long as they were hand-written barnold fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Oct 17, 2022 |
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 20:57
|
|
|
barnold posted:I was not good at math in school so I never took any of those classes What about now?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 21:31
|
|
|
Shadow0 posted:What about now? dont do this to me
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2022 23:11
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:My favorite was the drug dealer game. Spend all your money on heroin then just keep traveling around until addicts but at outrageous prices and you are good to go! I'm pretty sure my brother sought out reskins of drug wars because the calculator I inherited had like twenty different versions.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 00:50
|
|
|
I wrote my own (worse) version of drug wars, because the Casio had a graphics mode and a text mode and the drug wars game (cleverly called DRUX) used graphics mode to draw text. The advantage of this was that you could fit way more text on the screen but it was soooo slow. The other one I remember was basically a fake version of Super Mario that used the graphics mode to draw the first screen (not even the first level, no scrolling graphics!) of Super Mario Land 1-1.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 01:10
|
|
|
I never had a graphic calculator, but I did have a late '70s calculator which had a Blackjack game built into it: https://www.calculator.org/calculators/Toshiba_BC_1010-BJ.html I spent a lot of time in class trying to figure out how to play, but never really did fully figure it out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 03:36
|
|
|
barnold posted:i was lucky enough to have the other physics teacher in my school, one who lived by the mantra "your boss is never going to tell you that you can't look something up" so he would allow us to bring in as many notesheets for exams as we wanted as long as they were hand-written One of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my life lived by the mantra that "you don't have to know everything, you just have to know how to look it up." I had a math teacher in a class that required graphing calculators who would make us wipe them before every test, and come around to see the "memory wiped" or whatever screen to verify that. Not like you could write a very simple program to emulate that screen or anything... I didn't, I had the overpriced serial cable so that I could do a backup of everything at home first, but it was a trivial exercise if you knew what you were doing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 05:49
|
|
|
I had the school high score in Tetris on the TI83 thanks to being the only kid to figure out that it was more efficient for scoring to start at level 1 than at level 15 (I think?). That and Phantom Star were probably the reason why I needed extra tutoring to pass my physics exams.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 10:41
|
|
|
strtj posted:I had a math teacher in a class that required graphing calculators who would make us wipe them before every test, and come around to see the "memory wiped" or whatever screen to verify that. Not like you could write a very simple program to emulate that screen or anything... I didn't, I had the overpriced serial cable so that I could do a backup of everything at home first, but it was a trivial exercise if you knew what you were doing. I had a teacher like that too. I don't remember what it was, but there was some... sort of quasi-custom firmware available (OmniCalc? That sounds right) that had the ability to backup the programs in memory to the flash memory and restore them later. I used that every single math test I had in their classes. And as someone with poor memory, I have absolutely no remorse about it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2022 16:05
|
|
|
Snood and Tetris were my jam on the Ti-83.I was the nerd in the early 2000s who had the PC serial link cable and gave many games to classmates.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2022 23:49
|
|
|
~Coxy posted:NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! i had this sonofabitch and i think i played tetris on it. also a matching watch with IR emitter for messing with the school tv set
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2022 07:59
|
|
|
5318008
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2022 23:37
|
|
|
Snowy posted:5318008 I just changed the port for something in our software at work to 80085 just last week. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2022 17:48
|
|
|
Shadow0 posted:I just changed the port for something in our software at work to 80085 just last week. That's interesting considering they only go up to 65535 
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2022 18:43
|
|
|
Shadow0 posted:I just changed the port for something in our software at work to 80085 just last week. Yeah, you changed it to 14549 (which according to Wikipedia is not in common use, so you're probably fine)
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2022 18:47
|
|
|
more falafel please posted:Yeah, you changed it to 14549 (which according to Wikipedia is not in common use, so you're probably fine) The system works. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2022 18:21
|
|
|
I don't know if anyone else remembers it, but there were some pretty sweet NES game clones for the TI 83/83+. I had Mario, which came with a level editor, and Mega Man 83. The Mega Man game was especially cool: eight robot masters, each with weaknesses like in the 'real' games, and then a final boss (not Dr. Wily but another robot named the 'Titanic iniquity') that you had to defeat. On the text RPG side, there was South Park Quest, which I think involved gaining a certain blood alcohol level before you took on the big boss. I didn't watch South Park but I still enjoyed the game so much that I wrote my own version in the calculator's BASIC language.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2022 20:25
|
|
|
barnold posted:requiring a specific model TI graphing calculator is one of the greatest scams of all time, i'm with you 100%. the excuse of "oh it's an SAT/AP/ACT requirement" is complete horseshit. i had a TI-30XIIS and it was lovely (obviously not a graphing calculator though). if i had been forced to go to my parents and tell them "hey, you need to cough up $150 for a loving calculator" it would have been a bad time lol Yeah TI basically has a monopoly because Texas arbitrarily sets a lot of education standards for the rest of the country. On top of charging way too much they're built using slave labor.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 04:38
|
|
|
barnold posted:requiring a specific model TI graphing calculator is one of the greatest scams of all time, i'm with you 100%. the excuse of "oh it's an SAT/AP/ACT requirement" is complete horseshit. I did buy a TI-89, but I also had a Palm m100 with a graphing calculator app that was both faster in execution and quicker to enter formulas on, but I certainly could not use that on standardized tests. The main reason for the popularity of the TI-82/83/84 I assume was textbooks. TI got in with the textbook folks early and teachers of the time were generally not terribly comfortable with technology (even if they understood the value of it) and effectively standardizing on a model that was heavily tutorialized in textbooks made things much easier for everyone.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 17:45
|
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:At the time of its debut, was not the TI-89 the most featueful calculator you could use on the SAT? I know everyone loves the HP-48, but the TI-89 had CAS and stuff. I forget if you could use the 89 on the SAT. I want to say I had to bust out my 83+ for the SAT. You could, crucially, use the 89 on the AP Calculus exam, which was awesome.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
Maybe not the SAT but the ACT? Or SAT-II? I don't remember, but I'm having nightmares of those all now.
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 19:19
|
|
|
more falafel please posted:I forget if you could use the 89 on the SAT. I want to say I had to bust out my 83+ for the SAT. You could, crucially, use the 89 on the AP Calculus exam, which was awesome. I don't think you could because, if memory serves, you couldn't use a calculator with a keyboard? Not sure because the 89 may have been before the time when I took the SAT (~2002ish).
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 21:31
|
|
|
F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I don't think you could because, if memory serves, you couldn't use a calculator with a keyboard? Not sure because the 89 may have been before the time when I took the SAT (~2002ish). The 92 was the QWERTY one, the 89 was basically the guts of the 92 in a regular calculator-shaped shell.  
|
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 12, 2024 19:27 |
|
|
ExcessBLarg! posted:At the time of its debut, was not the TI-89 the most featueful calculator you could use on the SAT? I know everyone loves the HP-48, but the TI-89 had CAS and stuff. i mean maybe in 1998 but i did not go to high school in 1998, by that point we had other options that were cheaper and just as functional that we weren't allowed to use. by the time i was a senior i think they had started allowing exactly one specific model of Casio but i don't really remember anyway calculators are dumb (except for playing games and running sweet progz). if you can't do it with a slide rule and an abacus put it in the bin barnold fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Oct 29, 2022 |
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2022 00:20
|
|