Calculator Games

Last year over Tvacation, my nephew was grounded from his XBox. I broke out my girl's TI 84-Plus CSE calculator and learned TI Calculator BASIC. Reminded me of my Tandy PC-4 pocket computer that I programmed in BASIC to multiply matrices (Algebra II homework). I wrote four games worth mentioning:

1. BOUNCE - a single player Pong/Breakout type game
2. INVADERS - a Space Invaders variant
3. SCROLL - a driving game (it scrolls vertically, thus the name)
4. SNAKE - eat Pi's to grow, but don't run into yourself

The BASIC listings and upload files are over on GitHub. I guess the old adage "any port in a storm" goes without saying - the nephew ate these up for lack of his fancy 3D FPS. 

Here's a game play video of all four programs.

Notes

Bounce

The BOUNCE game is pretty basic. The ball only moves at 45 degree angles, and the angle is determined by where it is bounced off the paddle. Thus, it's possible to get it in an infinite loop and to rack up the score. The primary reason to write this game was training in TI Calculator BASIC.

Invaders

This is a fun one - a single row of space aliens animated by alternating "M" and "W" characters. There's no way in BASIC to look at the screen memory, so I had to keep track of the aliens in an array.

Scroll

Unimaginative name. I wrote the beginnings of a game like this in 6th grade on an Atari 400, but didn't understand enough to add the car logic. In this version, it took a little experimentation, but decided to only do collision detection on the nose of the car. Again, I had to keep track of the location of the track in an array. TI Calculator BASIC has list data types convenient for that.

Snake

The list datatype was extremely important for this game. In fact, I think it made it easy to program because the list length can grow just as the snake grows. There are two lists used to keep track of the row and column locations of each segment of the snake. When the snake head eats a PI symbol, one segment is added to the snake. Without lists, one would need to preallocate arrays and keep track of the tail. Maybe not that big of a deal, but there's a certain elegance in the TI Calculator BASIC solution.