TI84COM

TI84COM was a game I made for the TI-84 series of calculators. As I put it back in 2021, the game is "Technically Unfinished", but this wasn't for a lack of trying. See the issue stems from how the TI-84 is fundamentally coded, it just simply has a memory leak issue that can't ever be fixed should you code in a certain way† . For 99% of all programs made for the little beast this isn't an issue as said programs barely reach a quarter of the calculator's memory space (a whole whopping 24KB! (technically the one I have has 128KB because it's an older model but TI limits all of them to be 24KB)), but when you try to make a game you tend to wander while you program... and well... I hit the max size limit of the memory.

This meant, when I eventually coded in the wrong way (i.e. using a GoTo command inside of a Loop or If command), I would just simply waste a few bytes of memory forever and wouldn't get them back until the entire program ended. And, of course, I didn't really know this until I had finished coding the whole thing (with the game rife with said wrong ways of coding). I did attempt to fix this problem, but sadly didn't do a good job at all.

To past me's credit, this was the first "major" thing I had programmed by my own volition. It actually started from an even older project back when I was in high school called "AWG - A Wolf Game". The whole premise was that you'd go out, kill wolves, and then upgrade your gear to kill even more wolves. The idea was to reach a highscore, which would be a perfect time waster if you were in a math class you didn't really care for. Sadly AWG has been lost forever, but it was copied off the TI84 Game "Skyrim" - which was basically the same premise but with Skyrim enemies. So play that while squinting your eyes and the experience is the exact same. The reason why I never went back and fully fixed the game in all this time is because the memory issue is still a problem even if I fix the leak. I've hit the max limit, there's no way of getting more space to make new content unless I jailbreak the TI-84. And at that point, is the game really worth making? Going beyond what's allowed by a base model is cheating in a way, the challenge is gone.

So, why am I hosting this buggy broken game? Well, the game is kinda fun. I am biased, obviously, but give it a whirl if you still have an old TI-84 around. If you fix the code, shoot it my way and I'll post it here + give you credit + and think you're a really cool person.