Hello there all 10 people reading this!
I have been using this site as a tool for probably 4+ years and yet only decided to make an account now.
I absolutely love programming on the ti series and own a ti-84+CSE. I really like how much I, and many others can make using the very limited platform that is the ti series calculators, and as many have stated before, creativity can often come from limitations.
Let me give a bit of backstory on my calculator adventures as well as other programming endeavors. It's a long one, so be prepared.
Back in about 7th grade I saw a guy on the bus messing with his calculator. I looked around him and couldn't find any papers or books so I was completely lost as to what he was doing with just a random calculator.
So I went over and asked him. He explained that it was his graphing calculator and that he was programming a game on it.
"A game?" I thought. "How could that be possible? A calculator surely couldn't make anything too exciting…"
And boy did he prove me wrong… He immediately showed me a new game he was working on, it was essentially a wip pokemon card game on the calculator. He also showed me snake, a survival game, a basic ray-casting game and more.
I was amazed. I would almost immediately become friends with him and would maintain a friendship for about a year and a half before we arrived at some "issues". During our friendship however, he introduced me to Scratch, Ti programming, and basic game design. I ended up getting my first and only graphing calculator, the Ti-84+CSE. I never really did too much with it as the calculator was so difficult to navigate at the time. The most advanced thing I made was a guessing game where you had to guess a combination and it would give you clues. I would end up taking a class called "computer programming and game design." I loved it but I always found myself taking on projects far too ambitious for me to complete ( I tried making a RPG from scratch in game maker studios).
I enjoyed all the programming that I learned and would continue trying to push forth until high school. When I finally reached high school, I ended up having way too much work to do and could not make games or work on programming as much. So I would take frequent hiatuses lasting several months. I would occasionally try programming on my calculator, as it was the only language I was super familiar with, and would experience my first loss. My first "advanced program", the combination guesser, was lost to a ram clear. To say I was disappointed, would be an understatement.
Back since Minecraft was officially released, I had been almost obsessed with the game and especially redstone. And while I loved seeing the mods people would make and seeing all of different, I would never use a mod until I was given a gift in high school. A mod making course for Minecraft. I only made it part way through it before I eventually was side tracked by school again.
I would however, play with Minecraft in other ways. As I stated before I love redstone. I loved how all the wires mixed and mingled to create fantastic machines with most machines being built for the purpose of automation. I would over the entire duration of middle and high school grow increasingly more fond of redstone as I built increasingly more complex contraptions. I would eventually indefinitely stop after having made a fully functional calculator that could add and subtract 2, 2 digit numbers and output their values in the most compact way I could manage. That was finished back in high school around 10th grade.
My stop was not something I did intentionally though, as my parents had gotten upset with me and not having as good of grades as I should (A's and B's were an expectation). And so I went on to have about a 7 month period in which I was allowed no electronics. NONE, except for the essentials, that being my calculator, and my school assigned/controlled chromebook. That was about when my calculator programming started really increasing.
I found that this very site I had been using since year one of me owning my calculator, had a lot of useful information. So I would use this site with increasing frequency, but I never really liked the idea of joining forums and social media (I still only have facebook and I never use it). So I ended up only lurking about on the forums, always fascinated by the level of depth that some people had reached with their programming.
During the last few years of high school I ended up learning HTML, CSS, C++, Java, and bits of other languages thrown in. It had become pretty apparent that I was a very technology based individual, and would likely do something involving computers for a job.
Eventually I reached graduation, and it was stressful. But I made it through, and watched my friends go on to the next step of their lives as I entered college. I am currently in my first quarter of college as of writing this, and am about to go into my second. My planned major is computer science (unsurprisingly) and I expect to transfer into a 4 year university from the community college I am currently enrolled at.
About 3 months ago… I remembered that there was a game called "Tetris". It's a bit of an obscure game but I am sure you'll find something if you look it up. Anyways I never really found that much of an interest in tetris, as it seemed to be a rather mindless game with pretty simple rules, and I had always tried avoiding games where I don't need strategy or much thinking. I thought it was mindless… until I stumbled upon competitive tetris. If you have never seen a match of competitive tetris I highly suggest looking at some of the modern tournaments. I decided I wanted to try it, so within about 3 days I made it to almost a professional level (not a god like level though).
I really started enjoying the game for a good several weeks and then realized that I was wasting precious homework time. So I decided to use my newfound interest in tetris for something useful instead. I wanted to program tetris on my calculator. I had realized that it was something that had been done a handful of times but I wanted to make it myself. Using only my own code, and no external files. It was during this project that I finally broke. I made an account on here and dropped in with questions about optimizations for coding. As it stands I am currently most of the way through the tetris program, however I am having difficulties with memory.
Now I am pretty much up-to-date with this post.
My hope for what I do here is to help optimize and create programming. And, if I can, I want to help make the community better by either sparking up new things, or creating tools to aide in calculator programming, as it is something that has helped me throughout the past several years.
Now there are two ways that I could go on this forums. I will either leave the forums after a few months of activity as I have never been one to engage much in online communities, or I will make my best effort to make some kind of a name for myself on this site and help others for as long as I can.
I hope that I can be of use, and make wonderful things with you all. Also sorry for the incredibly long backstory, I got a lot of stuff to look back on when it comes to programming (and I shortened everything down too). I would like to make a list of goals for myself while I am here.
- Optimize or create a few useful scripts.
- Make or improve a tool for the community
- Make a community project
- Get to know most of the frequent people on here as well as anyone new
- Make games for others to enjoy