The void of space ...

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tr1p1ea
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The void of space ...

Post by tr1p1ea »

Posting on this forum feels like extreme isolation - like being stuck on Mars where you are literally the only person around!

That being said I plan on using the forums for my own projects as a kind of blog - mainly to drive some nostalgia :).

If you encounter this transmission, I am located at 77.5945 E, 18.3628 N - Find me.
"My world is Black & White. But if I blink fast enough, I see it in Grayscale."
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blueskies
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by blueskies »

I can't believe I remember my password. Or my username...
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DJ_O
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by DJ_O »

I wasn't sure about my username but yeah. I'll check out your projects since I sometimes visit this forum and others.

(Also I'm done with calcs since 3 years but I started lurking again more on calc forums after I became disabled)
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by Duck »

Hi all! Apparently my account also still works.
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tr1p1ea
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by tr1p1ea »

Hi blueskies, DJ & Duck! Good to see you check in on old MC once in a while :).
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DJ_O
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by DJ_O »

On a semi-related note, this would probably be ticalc.org queue right now if calcs were as popular today as they were in 2004:

https://i.imgur.com/tWcAshJ.png
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Timendus
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by Timendus »

It's pretty unbelievable that you guys are all still here. Or that the site is still up, even! It's been seven years since my last visit.

I just came here after watching some YouTube video's on 8 bit computing, looking to see if I could find the Vera source code. Would be fun to put on my Github :mrgreen:

Turns out I'm still hosting a Vera ROM file and some documentation tool that I seem to have written back in the day. On my own VPS, and I wasn't aware. I fixed that on my last visit here in 2012, it seems. Totally weird :bunny:

Anyway, can't seem to find the Vera source. If anyone still has it, I'd love to know :)
http://clap.timendus.com/ - The Calculator Link Alternative Protocol
http://api.timendus.com/ - Make your life easier, leave the coding to the API
http://vera.timendus.com/ - The calc lover's OS
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tr1p1ea
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by tr1p1ea »

Hi Timendus! Great to hear from you.

I sadly lost a lot of calc stuff in a HDD crash a few years back :(. Hopefully you can find vera somewhere. I remember making the 4lvl grayscale logo for it back in the day :).

EDIT - I had a very early backup of Vera: https://tr1p1ea.net/files/downloads/Vera.0.0.2.zip

There isn't much to it, but it's something.
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benryves
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by benryves »

Love the screenshot, DJ_O! :lol:

Good to hear you're still around Timendus! :) Unfortunately I can't help with Vera and the only files I can find on my hard disk are a few test XML files output by veradoc and a screenshot of the SVN repository, sorry. I'm glad tr1p1ea was able to recover something more useful!
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Screenshot of Vera's SVN repository on timendus.student.utwente.nl
Screenshot of Vera's SVN repository on timendus.student.utwente.nl
vera.zip
veradoc output, dated 2007-10-17 12:02
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Timendus
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by Timendus »

Hey guys! Thanks for helping out :)

There were several "restarts" of the Vera project, I have another old one. But neither of those two is really my code, I think :P The SVN repository that Ben references is the one I'm looking for. I'm sure I used to have a backup of that SVN server, but it looks like that harddisk crashed... :( Anyway, it's not that important anymore I guess.

Do you guys ever write any z80 code these days? Curious to hear about your projects!

Actually, I was looking at your website Ben, for a trip down memory lane, and I became interested in Chip-8. I didn't really see the point back then, but looking at it now (and playing with writing my own Chip-8 vm and assembler over the holidays) I'm really impressed in retrospect at what you managed to do on the calculator! That (or a Ti specific version of it), and BBC Basic would have been perfect candidates for programming platforms for Vera. I think you brought that up back then too, but I don't think I fully understood it then :mrgreen:

So thanks for inspiring me even now!

Edit: I put what we have on Vera online anyway for posterity :rofl: https://github.com/Timendus/vera
http://clap.timendus.com/ - The Calculator Link Alternative Protocol
http://api.timendus.com/ - Make your life easier, leave the coding to the API
http://vera.timendus.com/ - The calc lover's OS
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benryves
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by benryves »

Nice to see that you've compiled what you had into an interesting repository, Timendus. :) Thank you for sharing that!

I do like BBC BASIC (generally, not so much my calculator version) but in retrospect it was a poor fit for the TI calculator. It feels too much like a "computer" BASIC and needs a computer sort of environment (capable of free text entry, displaying a lot of information on the screen at once, good access to memory and a sensible file system). I certainly learned a lot from it, though, much as I learned a lot from working with Chip-8.

I have done a little bit of Z80 in the last year. I bought myself a Z88 computer and wrote a version of Laser Strike for it (based on the TI-83 Plus version named Laser Mayem) using a mixture of BBC BASIC for the main game logic and inline Z80 assembly for the graphics routines. More recently I did some experiments with the Sega Master System's light phaser and have a little test environment running where I can live track the aim position of two guns - my plan was to write a few Point Blank-style minigames but work has rather got in the way of that.

How about yourself? Have you been able to get back into any Z80 recently? What platform did your Chip-8 VM run on?
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tr1p1ea
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Re: The void of space ...

Post by tr1p1ea »

Great that there is something of Vera that can still be looked at. I guess there are also the docs so one could rewrite the documented routines based on what they are described as doing ... if someone could find that kind of time.

I still dabble in z80 - most recently for the newer colour calcs. Currently working on a Mario Kart clone for the CE :).
"My world is Black & White. But if I blink fast enough, I see it in Grayscale."
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