Is the TI community over?

[bb010g]

I run cross country and I have practice till 5 after school then dinner then homework so unless I stay up late there is not much room for CW

Woo! XC is awesome.

I sadly haven't had much time for calc stuff between AP, XC, and Rivals of Aether being released. I'm a bit at a loss for what to do with my Prime, though. Maybe a PPL compiler? I could use the work on parsers.

[Unicorn]

I'm a bit at a loss for what to do with my Prime, though. Maybe a PPL compiler? I could use the work on parsers.

You could give the Prime to me....

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Or to Streetwalrus. He wanted to make a bootloader to allow ASM/C on it but he won't do so unless he gets a Prime for free.

[novenary]

Yeah I'm not really interested in getting a new calc myself, I already have too many devices and I'm mostly busy with my gamecube projects in terms of hacking, so unless the community shows a real interest or someone donates one to me then I won't get a Prime. That said, we could do a fundraiser. (though that requires community interest, I don't expect anyone to give more than a few bucks)

[annoyingcalc]

I recently got back into calculator programming, and I am surprised by the lack of activity I've been seeing lately. Hopefully it picks up again.

[p4nix]

You can be part of that

[Dream of Omnimaga]

I recently got back into calculator programming, and I am surprised by the lack of activity I've been seeing lately. Hopefully it picks up again.

Yeah I think it was a combination of factors, but it seemed much more noticeable this year. It seemed like some users moved to different hobbies over the summer, while others were on vacation, then when school started they didn't have much time, and not many people joined to replace them like most years. As some people said, it could be due to our site traffic not having built up in time for school start, though, so most new potential users don't find us right away.


The best thing would be to put the site URL in our readmes when we release new games or demos, as well as in Youtube descriptions.

Also hai @annoyingcalc


EDIT: Just saw @catastropher post

I don't think the TI community is over. Personally, I haven't been around much due to health issues and school, but I'm going to put in much more effort to be active in the community. I'm still working on X3D and I'm going to become the maintainer of TISDCC (using SDCC to compile C for the Z80 calcs). I do think it would be really good for the community if we could get a post out on ticalc.org though.

What I am thinking is we could try to get them to write a news about the next big contest. We didn't for the 4x3 contest because we made it as a mini-contest at first and it only lasted 1 month. As it turns out, it had more participants than some large contests out there, though, despite being game-related.

[utz]

Don't worry guys... second week of October I'm going to release my major TI z80 project that I've been working on for more than half a year now. I'll be damned if that doesn't breathe at least 0.000001% more life into the TI community

On a more serious note, I think the TI community in general will prevail, but in a different form, and only if we start thinking about the future. In that future, we will see calculators slowly disappearing from the classrooms. I mean look at it that way, what is a calculator nowadays? It's a piece of hardware that can't do half of what a smartphone can, at double the price. The only reason they are still used at schools is that school governing bodies are conservative by nature and fear the new technologies. They are afraid that will lose control over what the kids can do with these tools (and the price of graphing calcs nowadays is determined almost exclusively by this fear).

It was the same when graphing calculators started to be rolled out in the 90s - at my last school they were still forbidden as late as 2003, because "oh my gosh, these kids are gonna do everything with the calculator, how are they supposed to learn teh maths that way". Now it's the same with tablets and smartphones (as much as I despise them personally) - "oh my gosh, the kids are gonna look up everything on the internetz, how are they supposed to learn..." and so on. But once the current generation of young mathematics teachers starts to get into decision making positions, attitudes (and curriculums) will start to change. It's still a few years away, but imo it will inevitably happen someday.

So, the question is, how will the calculator scene survive without calculators? Well, look at the home computer scene. It's all about machines that are obsolete since 20+ years, yet the scene is more alive nowadays than it has ever been since it's heyday in the late 80s/early 90s. Why? Because of nostalgia, because of  "dat retro feeling", obviously. But that's only one part of the medal. Another part is that people simply enjoy pushing these machines to and beyond their limits, because with limitation comes creativity - aka "I know it's a piece of crap, but look at the kewl stuff I can do with it!".

There's a notion of control that plays into this as well (perhaps ironically so, considering what I wrote about school govering bodies earlier). A TI-83+ or 84+ is comprehensible at a very low level, and you can bend it to your will almost entirely. It makes you feel in control. That is a certain appeal that smartphones or even the Nspire/Prime/etc don't have imo.

So, what needs to be done? Most importantly, I think the mission is to carry on and don't panic. Just keep doing cool stuff with calculators and other people will get interested in doing cool stuff with calculators.

Other than that, there is one thing I want to leave you guys with. I don't really know how to put it, so I'll just try to explain my own perspective of things. For me, it's somewhat difficult to feel at home in the TI scene. I'm mostly interested in coding solutions and using TI calcs for creative purposes. But to me it seems none of the 3 major English-language sites (CW, Omni, Cemetech) really have a focus on that. It's mostly games, chit-chat, and some school-related stuff (mostly in case of Cemetech), all of which I don't really care about. (Time gets a more precious resource as you get older, so you tend to set different priorities.) TI Planet seems to offer more in the direction of things interesting to me, but it's in French, which I don't speak very well. Hmmm... don't really know a solution to this. Don't think it's even a real problem tbh. But perhaps in the future there's gonna be more living fossils like myself in the scene, and I don't think they'll be too terribly interested in "the game" and "ponies", y'know?

Aaaaaaanyway, enough rambling.
tl:dr; don't worry, just carry on doing cool stuff with calculators and the ti community will survive.

[SiphonicSugar]

The best thing would be to put the site URL in our readmes when we release new games or demos, as well as in Youtube descriptions.

So when I finish my Axe Soccer game, I should put codewalr.us on the title screen or something?

[Unicorn]

Utz: I get that. I think that if these sites were only about calcs, it would be a litte boring. I mean sure, we do get offtopic, but if all we talked about were calcs, not computers, games, and other stuff, there would probably be a lot less people posting.

[novenary]

There's a notion of control that plays into this as well (perhaps ironically so, considering what I wrote about school govering bodies earlier). A TI-83+ or 84+ is comprehensible at a very low level, and you can bend it to your will almost entirely. It makes you feel in control. That is a certain appeal that smartphones or even the Nspire/Prime/etc don't have imo.

As an nspire and gamecube programmer I can assure you that larger platforms can give you as much control as 8 bit systems. Sure, they're more complex to work with but the extra power is often a nice plus. In the case of the nspire, I've spent hours reading hardware docs to be able to twist it in ways that no one did before. It's extremely flexible because the OS is not intrusive. While it's not really bare metal development it remains a relatively controllable platform (well, at least with ndless).

"the game" and "ponies"

I think it's slightly more varied than that. The "offtopic" conversation makes for a healthy community and (imo) doesn't hinder our main interests but instead helps keeping them alive. As Unicorn said, doing only calculator things would be boring. CW isn't dedicated to only calculators, although it's a major focus since we split off from Omni, but everything related to programming is welcome, and other miscellaneous conversation is desirable as I said.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

The best thing would be to put the site URL in our readmes when we release new games or demos, as well as in Youtube descriptions.

So when I finish my Axe Soccer game, I should put codewalr.us on the title screen or something?

It depends, since you are not staff you could always just put the site URL in your readme.txt or in the credits section for where to contact you.

Also I think what @utz refers to is for example the AtariAges sub-forums. The Atari 2600 has been discontinued 30 years ago, yet people still makes games for it and their community is growing. It's possible that once calcs are done serving their purposes, then they'll become retro platforms that people programs on as old school computers, just like Commodore and stuff. We can already see it happen with the TI-82 and 85. But since they aren't as known, it's hard to tell if such community would be large.

As for the off-topicness on calc forums, this has been something going on for decades. MaxCoderz forums have about 30% of their posts posted in the off-topic section. Most community members have other interests than calculators and in order to keep them around, forums always tried to allow them to discuss non-calculator stuff from time to time. It's something we have to live with on calc forums and there are some on which the off-topic interest is different than others (for example, Omni has more ponies/K'nex stuff, CW has more gaming and Youtube and Cemetech has more Minecraft/Lego/hardware modding.

CodeWalrus started with fewer calculator sub-forums than the other sites, though, because it was believed when the site started that the TI scene might be on its final miles, so we tried to focus on multiple things from the start.

[DarkestEx]

The best thing would be to put the site URL in our readmes when we release new games or demos, as well as in Youtube descriptions.

So when I finish my Axe Soccer game, I should put codewalr.us on the title screen or something?

It depends, since you are not staff you could always just put the site URL in your readme.txt or in the credits section for where to contact you.

Also I think what @utz refers to is for example the AtariAges sub-forums. The Atari 2600 has been discontinued 30 years ago, yet people still makes games for it and their community is growing. It's possible that once calcs are done serving their purposes, then they'll become retro platforms that people programs on as old school computers, just like Commodore and stuff. We can already see it happen with the TI-82 and 85. But since they aren't as known, it's hard to tell if such community would be large.

As for the off-topicness on calc forums, this has been something going on for decades. MaxCoderz forums have about 30% of their posts posted in the off-topic section. Most community members have other interests than calculators and in order to keep them around, forums always tried to allow them to discuss non-calculator stuff from time to time. It's something we have to live with on calc forums and there are some on which the off-topic interest is different than others (for example, Omni has more ponies/K'nex stuff, CW has more gaming and Youtube and Cemetech has more Minecraft/Lego/hardware modding.

CodeWalrus started with fewer calculator sub-forums than the other sites, though, because it was believed when the site started that the TI scene might be on its final miles, so we tried to focus on multiple things from the start.

It was a very good move to focus on multiple things instead of only calcs. I am glad you did so, because I still enjoy staying here and doing other, non-calc releated things. I don't see CW as a calc forum and I never did so even in my calc days. I always saw it as a programming, hardware, offtopic and calc forum. And this is great.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Yeah some people told me they didn't see CW as a calc forum. Of course tho it's our main focus right now since the site we split from was mostly calculator-related, but most founding members were at the end of their calculator "carreer" and doing more non-calc stuff. It's mostly focuses around game programming, hardware, programming in general and retro gaming, as well as pixel art. Mostly the old school-style stuff (even the music sometimes is, since when I make music I use a Playstation 1 software called Music 2000 ).

[SiphonicSugar]

I wish that forums could run on just on calculator related things...

EDIT: Wait no! I take that back! There are a lot of other cool things that don't have anything to do with calculators...