A primitive 3D engine for the TI-83+

[Spirit]

The guy who made XNA Quake is currently playing with a doom-like engine on the TI-83+ calculator. It is very interesting to follow.



Start with , there are two follow up posts at the time of this post.

[Spike]

I had a TI-83 many years ago. And yeah, I did have a go at a 3d engine... but even just plotting a simple mesh was painful.

The main problem is the slow as heck interpretted language with no jit optimisations whatsoever, combined with the fact that ifs are gotos and... yeah, well, point made. Rant over.

[metlslime]

The farthest i ever got on my TI-81 was a spinning 3d cube.

I also wrote a text adventure that only had 4 rooms. The main problem was running out of memory -- the 81 has a ridiculously small amount of storage. Like 2K or something.

[Sajt]

I had a TI-83 when I was in highschool. The holy grail of this thing was some sort of cable that let you develop asm/C programs on it (or download others' programs). But alas, such a treasure was never to befall me. I think one classmate had one at one point, and I asked to borrow it but it got held up somewhere and the months dragged on... I was stuck with the interpreted pseudo-basic thing, which is a million times slower than the fabled (but never actually seen by me) native programs. I remember filling up the memory with a lot of programs, mostly text stuff like multiple-choice adventure games (which had 26 rooms, since you had A-Z as labels), 8-ball programs with dozens of bizarre suggestions, and several random insult generators.

edit: typo

[Downsider]

I've got a TI-84+; works with a standard USB cable and you can write programs to run in ASM, they're quite fast, and there's already some 3D TI games out there. Most of them use raycasting, others use math to plot vertices.

[Error]

I did a small "doom rpg" style game on mine in algebra once.