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TI calculator gaming...

zxbrunozxbruno
edited January 2009 in Development
There's some dedicated people out there. Maybe this is old news, but I had no idea someone was converting modern games to monochrome versions in Z80 assembler and run it on a 6Mhz Zilog cpu...

http://tiwizard.com/downloads/index.php

Check out YouTube for videos of Zelda, Castlevania and others... all being played on an 8-bit calculator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohVoY48kWGk

And to think they only have a screen of 96×64 to work with, and a max of 128K of RAM.
Post edited by zxbruno on

Comments

  • IvanzxIvanzx
    edited January 2009
    Wow, it seems incredible that they are putting those games inside a calculator!
    Bu the way, when Castlevania ZX is finished, I think it's going to look like pretty much like the one you link Bruno.

    And I don't know if you knew that some year ago, there was a spanish guy who converted a game from calculator to the Spectrum, here it is :

    http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0015782

    Cheers!
    <a href="http://rincondelspectrum.blogspot.de/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://rincondelspectrum.blogspot.de/</a>;
  • RalfRalf
    edited January 2009
    Very impressive.


    I wonder if it would involve much effort to convert these calculator games to Zx Spectrum.

    I'm afraid however that they would run very slowly at Zx as these calculators have clocks from 6 MHz to 15 MHz and Spectrum has 3.5 MHz.
  • LCDLCD
    edited January 2009
    Ralf wrote: »
    Very impressive.


    I wonder if it would involve much effort to convert these calculator games to Zx Spectrum.

    I'm afraid however that they would run very slowly at Zx as these calculators have clocks from 6 MHz to 15 MHz and Spectrum has 3.5 MHz.

    Not to forget that the screen area occupies 5-9 times less memory than on Spectrum. It is like using block graphics (64x48) on ZX81.
  • WinstonWinston
    edited January 2009
    Incidentally, the Z80 based TI calculator is one of the targets for the Z88DK.
  • thx1138thx1138
    edited January 2009
    I did have some old copies of Caclulator and Computer magazine from the mid-70's.

    There were a few simple type in games for the TI-SR52, the one with the removable magnetic memory strips amongst others back then. :D
  • RalfRalf
    edited January 2009
    And what needs to be done on assembler level to display grapics on this calculator? Does it have part of RAM memory which stores screen like in Spectrum, or do you need to perform OUT commands to send graphics bytes via ports?

    I checked also more thoroughly parameters of this calculators. They are in many cases worse than Zx Spectrum. Still these games are really impressive.

    E.g TI-83 calculator has:

    Display: 96x64 monochrome
    CPU: Z80 6MHz
    Available RAM memory: 32 KB

    I think it would be possible to create on Spectrum 128KB an emulator of it running at about 25% of original speed. But it would involve a really talented person.
  • 0sAND1s0sAND1s
    edited January 2009
    Ralf wrote: »
    I think it would be possible to create on Spectrum 128KB an emulator of it running at about 25% of original speed. But it would involve a really talented person.

    There's a Spectrum emulator for TI89 and TI92+ written by Samir Ribic, co-author of Warajevo Spectrum emulator for PC. Quite amazing.
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