It's ZShell all over again!

Seriously, if they're that worried about ASM, why don't they just rerelease the TI-81 and have students buy that... Oops, my bad.

I started NikkySim in TI-BASIC, but it took a minute to generate every sentence, so I rewrote the program in C for release. I believe I included a copy of the BASIC prototype in the ZIP just for fun, though.

The TI-89 program just output phrases based on a RNG seed, and all the vocabulary was static—there was no learning. Nikkybot is a fully interactive bot with some weak AI, but since it runs on a PC, storage space for learning isn't much of a concern.

I haven't had much experience writing things like this on a memory-limited platform. You may not be able to do much except simply limit the amount of learning it does. Perhaps you could keep track of how often each piece of information is used, and when memory gets low, just have it forget the stuff that was used the least.

You might be able to do clever tricks like compression, but this tends to add significant complexity and reduce performance. I've written programs on the TI-89 and HP 50g for myself that needed to track more data than can fit in RAM at once, and I did this by breaking the dataset into groups of variables small enough to individually fit in RAM and writing an abstraction layer for reading/writing it that figures out what's currently in RAM, where to find the requested data, and handle shuffling stuff in and out of flash as needed. They worked but weren't terribly fun to write and debug, and the extra overhead makes everything really slow.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 19, 2015, 05:05:58 AMTo circumvent the lack of Then/Else/End limitation on the 81, I just used an extra sub-program

Haha yeah, I tended to shy away from that because it didn't feel right cluttering up my programs list with programs that wouldn't be useful to run on their own. On the 82/85 I eventually started using subprograms but started their names with Greek letters so they would stay at the end of the list and out of the way.

Some stuff from my first TI-81 programs written in a notebook:


:Lbl A
[display a menu]
:Input θ
:If θ=1
:Goto A
:If θ=2
:Goto B
:If θ=3
:Goto C
[...]
:Lbl C
:0→H
:Goto A


And:


:Lbl B
[...]
:If M<1
:Goto 3
:Goto 4
:Lbl 3
:Disp "EMPTY FUEL TANK"
:Goto 5
:Lbl 4
:Disp M
:Lbl 5
[...]
:Goto B


Mmm, spaghetti.

From an 8-ball program:


:IPart(Rand*100)→R
:If R≥80
:Goto 1
:If R≥60
:Goto 2
[...]
:Lbl 1
:Disp "ASK AGAIN LATER"
:End
:Lbl 2
:Disp "YES, OF COURSE"
:End
[...]


Obviously could have gotten rid of all the End and eliminated Lbl/Goto altogether because each Disp is only one instruction. (The 81 didn't have If-Then so some Lbl/Goto were justified. But not here. )

Also, the notebook itself is sort of fail because I wrote one column of code per page, using only the left quarter of it and wasting the rest. And several programs had missing/wrong code, because of course I didn't bother double-checking that I copied them down correctly. Oops.

When I got the TI-82 and finally figured out the Goto memory leak, this was my first approach to working around it:


:For/While/Repeat/If-Then
[stuff]
:Goto A
:End
:Lbl B
[...]
:Lbl A
[more stuff]
:End
:Goto B


Hey, it worked.

Click Here to eliminate random floating Walruses

It's Nikky's fault

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 11, 2015, 05:18:47 PM
What are the keystroke glitches? Do keys just stop working randomly or become scrambled like on the Nspire?

Often when you press a key (especially when it's right at the moment the busy annunciator goes off) it will be "ignored", only to get processed with the next key you press. Also, keys like arrows and backspace sometimes "stick" and continue moving the cursor or deleting everything you wrote after you press once, until you press another key (or hit the thing with a hammer). Same with shift keys and alpha sometimes, or they'll work inconsistently or the annunciator won't come on or off when it should. Also, the Try to Recover Memory? prompt for some reason sometimes refuses to accept any keys until you press a different key followed by the original one. (They actually put a note in a manual about that last one, rather than actually fixing it.)

I thought my computer was possessed.

I don't see why there couldn't be a library for graphics/game stuff or whatever, though, right? Whether it would be pleasant to code in would be a matter of opinion, I guess. Personally I wouldn't enjoy counting all the parentheses. I find Forth/RPL-like languages fun in a way, though it can be a pain to read old code without comments. I sometimes have to actually mentally execute the code in my head (or with the debugger) to figure out what it does... On the other hand it made for relatively simple parsers and really fast and efficient execution.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 09, 2015, 04:02:44 PM
Indeed it really has potential IMHO. The bugs are not as bad as they used to be, but it's still common to read about users who got their calc to reboot or even freeze. I think the current team wants to fix the bugs, but the issue is that unlike the HP 50g where it was maintained by a team of about 50-400 staff members, the HP Prime is maintained by about 3-4 people who are in constant danger of losing their job through HP mass layoffs.

Yikes. It would be a pretty smart move to lay off the only remaining OS developers.

To be fair, the HP 50g ROM had some updates for a while (I'm not even sure that the devs were still getting paid to do it), and I've heard that it's very difficult to modify due to so much being packed into the maximum available space, plus routines having to stay at fixed memory locations due to how RPL works. Supposedly, there's almost no room left for bug fixes (though I've also heard some argue there's room for optimization). However, my main gripe, I think, is with the ARM emulator or possibly the hardware design, which causes constant keystroke glitches, unreliable alarms when the calc is off (they're practically useless as a result), and even random freeze-ups.

Whoa, parallax scrolling?! 

The HP Prime is looking like a very interesting development platform.

Although hearing about bugs seems a bit scary. Is HP interested in hearing feedback and fixing issues? I know they never once bothered to fix the major hardware flaws of the HP 49g/50g series. 

How It's Made and MythBusters are about the only things I follow now.

Commercial TV is mostly too unpleasant for me to deal with nowadays, and having to use a cable box/DVR programmed by "developers" who couldn't write a Hello World program in BASIC correctly, even more so.

If I want to watch something, I usually just browse YouTube or something. Or wait until bedtime and see what kind of awesome dreams my mind comes up with; they're always good.

Ouch, that's the worst. Can't believe they still don't ask confirmation or anything before deleting something like the 89 (or gave it a different key that's not as easy to hit by accident).
Yeah, the order on the 89 took some getting used to, I think, but I got used to that just like I got used to the wacky order of keys on the QWERTY (and later Dvorak) keyboard layouts.

Quote from: Eiyeron on January 31, 2015, 10:05:38 AM
Yeah, they kept the hardest games and threw off to you the easiest ones. THe fun sotry is because SMB2J was called "not appealing" to the US players (and "too hard"). Go figure when one can play Megaman or TMNT on NES.

Or Batman or Ghosts and Goblins or one of those games mentioned in a AVGN video?
Kind of a shame RPGs weren't so popular here, since those are my favorite genre. Platformers like SMB/Megaman/etc. were cool, as were Zelda-like games, though I personally wasn't much into, say, fighting games, since they just seemed like boring button-mashers to me. I especially like games that involve exploration where you obtain items/abilities that unlock areas you couldn't reach earlier in the game. Zelda had a lot of that, as did WonderBoy III: The Dragon's Trap on Sega Master System--another classic I remember from childhood (a friend had that system). NES Strider was a fascinating game to me for that reason, too.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 31, 2015, 04:33:48 PM
When I did calc programming in 2003-07 or so, I didn't check my keypad while typing. I started again by 2010 or so but usually when I was getting used again to doing it regularly I stopped watching the keypad.

Of course now it's a different story with new calcs like the HP Prime, but for most new calcs I program on the computer anyway.

I got fairly good at blind typing on my TI-89(t) and HP 50g's, which I've used for many years. Not as fast as a good PC keyboard, but faster (and less painful) than handwriting. Although the 89T keyboard is so screwed up with that curvy nonsense that I still constantly hit the wrong keys, which annoys the hell out of me. It also likes to double keystrokes when I press/release alpha while still holding a key. There aren't too many things in life that put me in a foul mood faster than crappy input devices.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 06, 2015, 05:36:34 AMOh you need 20 posts to rate posts. It used to be 0 but that was a config error. This is to prevent people from joining only to rate their friends up or things like that

Ah, got it. Maybe I'll make a to-do list of all the friends cool posts to rate up once I get there. :evil:

Quote from: Eiyeron on February 06, 2015, 04:36:16 PMPossibly multiple models with differents colors, a strap to avoid throwing your calc into the TV or  limited memory/performances because they don't make the calc, it's the experience which makes it.

Who wants to bet that's what's next? A separate model name for each color they introduce! Then they can just discontinue colors and reintroduce them as new models. Saves costs over their current strategy, see.