Hi, and thanks for reading the ticalc.org Newsletter!

After falling a little behind in January, ticalc.org has been pretty active in February. There's been lots of new programs released, a few milestones, and some other miscellaneous news here and there.

This month we passed 15,000 files in our archives. We thank everyone for their support as the web's largest TI calculator archive gets even larger.

This month I've interviewed Sebastian Reichelt, a prominent member of the TIGCC team and webmaster of ticalc.org's newest hosted site, http://tigcc.ticalc.org/.

Eric Sun

Many new programs were released this month. Most were updates and ports of existing programs, however there were a few notable new programs as well.

Jason Ho broke onto the TI scene with this first major program, Alien Invasion. If you haven't tried it yet, it's a shoot-em-up game similar to Phoenix. Thomas Nussbaumer is currently developing a new gaming engine for the TI-89 and TI-92+ that will make 3D graphics a whole lot easier for programmers. Check it out in our archives (FAT-Engline Demo). Thomas has also released the TICT-Explorer, a GUI for the TI-89 and TI-92+.

Other notable releases include Dying Eyes and Joltima ports to the TI-83+, feats that were enabled by working around the size limit for programs imposed by Texas Instruments.

Eric Sun

Back in the day, advanced calculator programming was pretty restrictive for most users. After all, it required rudimentary compiling tools, various obfuscated include files, and worst of all, a knowledge of assembly language, which isn't exactly the easiest programming language to learn. Thus, it used to be that if a program was coded in assembly language, it was probably worth the time it took to download and put on the calculator.

Now, with the explosion of the TIGCC Project, more and more programs are being coded in C for the TI-89 and TI-92+. And with good reason- the environment is more friendly, the compilation is easier, and best of all, C is a heck of a lot easier to learn than assembly.

As TIGCC gathers more and more steam (which I fully expect to happen), assembly coding for the TI-89 and TI-92+ will steadily decrease. I can attest to that first-hand with my experience adding to the ticalc.org archives and the recent classification of the assembly files to DoorsOS and no-stub files (most of which were made in C).

In most ways this is a good thing- powerful programs can be easily made, and thus there will be a huge number of new programs released for the TI-89 and TI-92+. Assembly tends to be harder to learn, and thus we usually have the same people releasing everything. C, however, is much more ubiquitous, and thus can be mastered easily for the calculator. An example is Jason Ho, who, with little experience in calculator projects in the past, immediately embarked on Alien Invasion, which has turned into an instant hit.

All this good stuff may come at a cost, however. Since TIGCC makes assembly so much easier, the number of "bad" programs in our assembly folders will undoubtedly increase as well. Until now, for most games, "BASIC" has been virtually synonymous with "bad" while "Assembly" has been synonymous with "good." This will probably change.

Another problem: what would happen if TIGCC suddenly could no longer be used? As we become increasingly dependent on TIGCC, perhaps assembly knowledge could eventually die out. What if some new crazy development at TI made C programs really slow, or even useless, and the TIGCC maintainers were too busy or didn't want to update the program? Would that mean the death of most TI-89 and TI-92+ assembly programs?

Don't take this as a discouragement for using TIGCC; I think it's a great program and have the utmost respect for its maintainers. I'd even encourage its use; however, I'd caution people to depend on it so much.

Eric Sun

At ticalc.org, we often receive many of the same questions. In this column, we hope to address some of these questions for a broader audience. If you'd like to submit a question, please email it to ask@ticalc.org.

Q: Why won't this assembly program work on my TI-89 or TI-92+?

A: Some assembly programs require a shell such as DoorsOS or UniversalOS, while others do not. If you're attempting to run a program and get an error message, you might want to try installing a shell. To reduce these problems, I have separated the TI-89 and TI-92+ assembly directories into nostub (no shell required) and DoorsOS (shell required) categories. More information can be found at http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/4/47/47030.html. Hope this eliminates some confusion.

Eric Sun