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The CodeWalrus Programming Newsletter - Winter 2015 Edition

Started by Dream of Omnimaga, March 31, 2015, 03:17:49 AM

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Dream of Omnimaga

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The CodeWalrus Programming Newsletter - Winter 2015 Edition

Announcement
Hello and welcome to the CWPN, the first edition of the CodeWalrus Programming Newsletter! CodeWalrus forums have opened to the great public on January 1st 2015 and there have been quite a lot of activity ever since. At the end of every season (in this case, Winter), a newsletter will be sent, summarizing events about what happened on the forums during the past season, such as program releases, notable projects and some big calculator community milestones. This edition covers January, February and March. Hopefully if you haven't visited the website or forums in a while (or were not aware that it was already open), this newsletter should help you catch up easier!

TI-83 Premium CE and TI-84 Plus CE released
In March 2015, the successor to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition was released: the TI-84 Plus CE, and its French incarnation, the TI-83 Premium CE, is coming soon as well: http://codewalr.us/181 . Both models are compatible and they feature an eZ80 processor, considerably faster speed (especially the memory-mapped screen), much more RAM and are lighter. Although there are some hardware lock-downs by Texas Instruments, ASM is still perfectly possible and the more experienced TI community members are slowly discovering its way around those limitations, without necessarily using exploits. The main CodeWalrus discussion thread is located at http://codewalr.us/346 and there is also a Cemetech one at http://www.cemete.ch/t11405

First big CW program release imminent?
First Fantasy: Mana Force is a DCSE-enhanced BASIC remake of DJ Omnimaga's Mana Force RPG classic, allowing you to experience one of DJ Omnimaga's first TI-83 Plus RPG into full TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition color. While trying to remain true to the original in terms of ASCII art, it now features full color, new magic animations, new menus, various new additions and new spells! What's left to be done is balancing and adding more features to the game. It might not be as complex as The Reign of Legends series nor Illusiat 13, but with the new additions and small amount of sub-programs, this game should cater to a larger JRPG audience. This is also the first 84+CSE RPG that might get released and one of the rare hybrid BASIC games for that model to use the full 320x240 resolution mode. The official sub-forum for this project can be found at http://codewalr.us/index.php?board=25.0 and you can watch a video trailer at https://youtube.com/watch?v=-OtQg7tCpXk

Hexagon for monochrome calculators!
Among the smaller or newer projects, Eiyeron and Matrefeytontias have been working on their respective clones of Hexagon, a popular phone game. Eiyeron's version is for the Casio FX-9860G series, while Matref version is for the TI-83 Plus series. They are not finished but from the last demos, the games look very promising! Head over to their respective sub-forums to check them out: http://codewalr.us/index.php?board=26.0 http://codewalr.us/index.php?board=27.0

Other projects being worked on
Don't forget to check out http://codewalr.us/index.php?action=forum to find more projects in the works. Besides the featured ones, we got one sub-forum for calculator project showcase and one for non-calculator material.

Staff changes and site updates
In ensure that maintaining CodeWalrus is feasible in long terms with small amounts of full-time staff, we have decided to open a new staff group called Part-time staff, where people with limited free time can still help if they wish when they can. Some other changes and additions occurred since the site open on New Year as well. http://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=317.0 In addition to that, in order to give people more chances to get recognized in the TI community, we also opened a new member group called Elite Coders, which gives certain notable programmers a special badge and extra project sub-forum privileges (although it's still possible to have such sub-forum even outside the group if you have a notable project in the works and are willing to post updates in your topic. There will most likely still be more additions to the website in the near future.

CodeWalrus contest
There is a mini-programming contest coming soon on CodeWalrus. What we will be looking at the most is how creative you can get and while our theme might seem impossible, there are in fact many possibilities. Make sure to check the website front page regularly for updates!

Stay in touch!
If you have any submission ideas for next newsletters, feel free to PM a CodeWalrus staff or e-mail us at a d m i n @ c o d e w a l r . u s. They will be forwarded to the whole team in our staff sub-forum. Also, besides the forums, we got an IRC channel called #CodeWalrus , which is reachable from EFnet (where other big TI calculator channels are located) and Omninet (Omnimaga IRC network). You can also use the IRC chatroom directly from the WalrusIRC or OmnomIRC shoutboxes on the website, depending of your account settings (you need 5 posts to do so).

Credits
-DJ Omnimaga - CWPN founder
-DJ Omnimaga - Contributor
-Special thanks to people who have contributed to CodeWalrus, projects and news, and of course, the staff.

You can view a forum version of this newsletter as well as past ones at the following URL: http://codewalr.us/index.php?board=32.0 or http://codewalr.us/index.php?board=32.0;wap

If you would like to subscribe or unsubscribe to the site newsletter and e-mail annoucements, go to the forums, click Profile, then head to the Notifications section and the option to check or uncheck is "Receive forum newsletters, announcements and important notifications by email.". If you do not have a forum account, you can now setup that option while registering. Don't hesitate to sign up and say hi or showcase your projects. We hope that you feel at home if you do!

CodeWalrus website: http://codewalr.us
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

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