My TI-83 Basic Page

What is TI-83 Basic?

The TI-83 calculator is made by Texas Instruments. It's an excellent calculator, even if they do keep coming out with newer and uglier versions. I like the original TI-83s, and I like to program them in TI-Basic, which is the high-level programming language designed especially to work with them. Sure, at the core the TI-83 is just a Z80 processor that you can hack in hexadecimal; but I prefer the more Zen-like TI-Basic, in which it is somehow easier to work, yet at the same time a real challenge to produce an interesting result.

On this page, I've collected some of my own interesting results. Some of them are mirrored through my profile at ticalc.org; others are too insignificant to clutter that site, and are just placed here so I won't lose track of them. They're all free, as is generally true of the TI community. I hope you find something to interest you here.

Really good programs

• My Complete TI-83 Basic Optimization Guide [ticalc] was featured on ticalc.org.
• A guy once told me that my Hunt The Wumpus [ticalc] changed his life. (Now comes in three excellent flavors!)
• In summer 2004, I wrote a TI-Basic translation of Greg Troutman's homebrew Atari 2600 text adventure Dark Mage [ticalc]. It is very much a proof of concept, though it is playable.
• I wrote two "shared libraries" to use with card-playing games: ZCRD, which draws playing cards, and ZPKEVAL, which evaluates poker hands. These four programs all use ZCRD:
  • Texas Hold'em [ticalc], versus an AI. The AI isn't too good, but it's fast and a reasonably fun way to kill time.
  • Commerce [ticalc], a three-to-five-player rummy-style game versus an AI. I think it's a boring game, but the implementation is impressive.
  • Video poker, a plain vanilla draw poker implementation.
  • Blackjack [ticalc], a plain vanilla blackjack implementation (with slightly broken rules).
  
  
• World Empire 83 [ticalc], a Risk-style war game versus an AI. Next to Texas Hold'em, this is my best-looking game to date — meaning it has actual art!
• Castle Adventure [ticalc], a text adventure game for the TI-83 I wrote in the summer of 2006. I'd been planning this one for a long time — since before "Dark Mage" — and I finally got it done. It's a little poky, but playable, especially since it can save and restore the current game.
• Abbey Adventure [ticalc], the sequel to "Castle Adventure", featuring path-finding guards. This one is more frustrating than puzzling, at least for me. It has the same state-of-the-art command input as "Castle Adventure", and shares its external subroutine for scrolling text on the graph screen.
• BS, a tiny battleship-type game.
• DUQZ, a tiny Duck Hunt game.
• A whole set of maths programs:
  • ABIGSIV (Robert Gaebler's lightning factorization program)
  • AREA (Riemann sums)
  • BASECNVT (base X to base Y)
  • CHINESE (simultaneous congruences)
  • CHSPLIT (Chinese Remainder Theorem)
  • CRAMER (Cramer's method)
  • MODINV (multiplicative inverse modulo M)
  • MODPOW (positive integral powers modulo M)
  • QQ (bare-bones quadratic formula program)

Proof-of-concept programs

• TETRX 1K [ticalc], a Basic hack I perpetrated in high school. It's the Tetris game we all know and love, written in just about 1000 bytes of TI-83 Basic code. It's incredibly slow.
• Another tour de force, TI-Brainf*** [ticalc], I wrote in 2002 (see Cat's Eye for details on the language). It's a pair of interpreters allowing you esoteric-language freaks to run Brainf*** programs during math class.
• TI-Rogue [ticalc] is a roguelike for the TI-83. It's abysmally slow, and pretty much every algorithmic part of it is a hack or kludge of some kind. I may revisit this genre sometime down the road.

TI-83 Basic optimizer

My current project, when I'm not doing real work, is tiopt, an automatic micro-optimizer for TI-83 Basic programs. You can see a recent development snapshot here. This program is not yet ready for the big time, but it can do some simple optimizations, and it automates tedious tasks such as renaming variables and labels. See this page for details.

Other people's pages

• Texas Instruments makes the TI-83 calculator.
• ticalc.org hosts program archives and mailing lists for TI-calculator enthusiasts.
• SiCoDe is a TI-Basic programming group that used to write some neat programs, until they broke up.
• Weregoose has a page of code snippets, some of which are pretty arcane mathematics.