Our most ambitious webapp yet is now available. The ORG IDE is a complete IDE and assembler for Z80-assembly projects, particularly for those designed for the TI-83 Plus–series calculators. Featuring a tabbed interface with a syntax-highlighting code editor (by CodeMirror), you can now edit, build, download, and host Z80 projects with any number of files from any web browser.

In less dramatic news, our front page received yet another facelift. Hopefully this one sticks around.

But before we get to that, Simul 2 won first place in the extended-BASIC section of zContest 3! And if there had been a prize for largest screenshot size, Simul would have won that, too. (It was also the most difficult screenshot I've ever taken, even at 25% speed.)

And now I'm back to working on Contra. Besides making some much-needed sprite changes (more are on the way, in the name of visibility), I've also re-implemented moving enemies (which can now jump around on platforms), added swimming, and made jumping and scrolling completely smooth. Even with that, the program still has a delay to slow down each frame (on a TI-83 Plus, too), so I'm still free to add falcons and those flying football-shaped things.

There are now four new online tools in the ClrHome /b/ folder, and unfortunately, none of them have much to do with calculators.

b up is an HTTP status code checker (checking for things like 404 messages and redirections). It's like any of the dozens of "is it down for everyone or just me" sites, except that it shows how a page is "down" or "up." I've always used isup.me for that purpose, but I decided to make this a few days ago when I realized that what I really needed was something that told me what actually happened—whether a page was Forbidden or Not Found, whether it redirected permanently or temporarily.

The notifier (dubbed "Calculator Stuff" for now) is a browser extension (our first) that feeds recent forum activity on Omnimaga, Cemetech, and Revolution Software into your browser toolbar. It features options such as number of posts to fetch and time between fetches and also keeps track of your display name to ignore posts you made. It's currently available for Google Chrome only.

And finally there's /b/roccoli, the Recursive Broccoli.

Nine months ago, the Kingdom of ClrHome annexed Blast Programs, a similarly small country ruled by one Anthony Cagliano. After granting a pardon (and fellow kingship) to the king of Blast, we incorporated the new territory into the new ClrHome Empire, spanning the entire domain of clrhome.tk.

This month, we have again scored a victory in the diplomacy of calculator websites. TakeFlight Productions, dedicated not to the worship of TI but to Casio, has joined us in brotherly alliance. Together, we've found that despite any religious differences, the two sites have similar goals in this dangerous world: we're both involved in calculator and web development, we both do (or are planning to do) reviews of calculator games, and we both host a version of the Wikipad—Casio on TakeFlight, TI on ClrHome.

At the same time, ClrHome conquered the valuable domain of clrhome.org by the brilliant military strategies of her general, alberthrocks. TakeFlight has been granted its portion of the rich spoils, located at casio.clrhome.org. Rejoice.

I'm not messing with you - you get to update all those links, signatures, etc. again! But it's nothing to regret - we now have a TLD domain name for ClrHome!

Yup, you got that right - we've gotten a shiny new domain name - clrhome.org!
A mystery Santa registered and gave this domain to us (the admins can reveal that Santa if they would like ;)), and so now we have a legitimate domain name!

No worries - we are still on Juju's VPS, and all of your project data will still be intact.
It's just that we'll be in limbo between clrhome.tk and clrhome.org temporarily...
Also, search engine optimization is at its peak, since we have a (again, using that word) legitimate domain name! (In plain English: expect to see ClrHome near the top of the Google search results!)

I'm not terribly sure how all of this DNS is supposed to sort itself out (after all, Deep Thought does most of the site maintenance), but just in case, you (visitors, admins, etc.) should change the links you're allowed to change (such as your bookmarks, if anybody's bookmarking us, and forum/email signatures). Thanks, and sorry about the new mess #2!

P.S. - if you don't know me, I'm one of the older (older as in earlier, not age older) admins on ClrHome. I just don't post as often - or rather, post at all! :P (This counts as my first blog post.) You can find me on Omnimaga and Cemetech with the same username.

I am pleased to announce the 10th consecutive day of substantial Star Trek progress. As of now, the planning phase is entirely complete and I am coding features. The framework of the program and its GUI is done. Now working on the battle loop and networking. Just a few fun facts before I go into features:

Pages: 41
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As for features, there are a few. Not all are coded yet, but they will be available.

1. Defeating another player earns you battle points. Use these battle points to purchase equipment for your ship.

2. Upgrades. Upgrading a ship system increases its maximum health, to a max of 255. Upgrading the generator system increasing its max health; upgrading the unit itself increases its max power output. Upgrading weapons (phasers/photons) allows them to cause more damage. Upgrading the scrambler allows it to last longer. Upgrading the cloaking device allows you to do more things while cloaked that you would normally have to uncloak to do.

3. Locking. Press one key to lock on to a ship in the same 255 x 255 x 255 as you. Press it again to choose another. Locking is essential for firing weapons. The only thing that will work without it is the scrambler.

4. Ship has a Power Supply Drive. Every system that is in use drains power. The impulse drive and warp drive both drain power steadily while in use. Firing weapons costs power. Cloaking drains power at a steady rate. Shields drain power at a steady rate. Transporting costs power. Your generator is designed such that, at max power, your ship can function with all main systems online and shields raised, and not lose power. However, if you upgrade your weapons (more powerful weapons consume more power) and the cloak (the more powerful cloak costs more power), and have everything raised at once, without upgrading your generator, you will likely exhaust your power supply. Should you run out of power, all systems that require energy will fail until power is available, including your shields. A warning will display on your screen when power is getting low, so that you may cut back power usage by lowering your cloak, halting your ship, or doing some other action that reduces power usage. All of your main systems must always use the same amount of power to function, so cutting them back is not an option. However, you can cut back two systems, your Weapons and Sensors. Cutting back the power to weapons makes them less powerful (a weapon fired with 60% power to the system will deal only 60% of its max damage). Cutting back power to sensors decreases their range. You can control this in the "Power" menu. If the generator takes damage, it starts to put out less power, which can be problematic for you if the power supply is not keeping up with the base demands of the ship.

I've decided to enter two games into the pure-BASIC section of zContest this year, and both are essentially finished. I've posted about Absolute Madness before; it's my sequel to AbsIns, a TI-BASIC puzzle platformer. I've finished the level designing and capped it at 21 levels. That should be enough. (I don't really expect many people to beat the first two-thirds, honestly.) It also got a little intro cutscene today, and even if it's short and simple, it's the biggest effort I've ever spent on a game introduction of any sort. You can see it here.

My other planned entry, Minesweeper, could have been an update to my first (simpler) Minesweeper port, but it's really a complete rewrite. This time, it features flood-filling, a white-on-black theme, and the biggest effort I've spent on graphics for any game. Ever.

Back when I released Simul, it was my best Axe game ever. It was my first Axe game ever, and it was cumbersome at best. To play the final stage, Stage IV (dubbed "fourplay" because—well, you'll see), you needed to stretch both thumb and index finger (on both hands) to false arrow keys buried in the middle of the keypad.

That's all changed. My entry for the extended-BASIC section of zContest 2011 is Simul 2: a complete rewrite of that multitasking game. Here's a screenshot.

So what's different? This time around, I focused on making the game playable. Every game uses two buttons and only two buttons, either the up and down arrows, left and right arrows, MODE (acting as up) and X,T,θ,n (acting as down), or ALPHA (acting as left) and STAT (acting as right). That way, four games can be played at once using only eight buttons that are a reasonable distance from one another. Only your thumbs play the games, like they were meant to do.

Another issue with the old version was that the game ended as soon as you died in any of the minigames, so even getting to Stage IV was nearly impossible, even at the slow speed. That's been changed too. In the new version, only your progress in the current stage is reset when you fail a game; you can keep playing, but your death count is tracking your progress all the while and leaves an impact on your final score. And yes, there are scores this time.

For those of you who have never played Simul before, it's essentially a game of multitasking. In Stage I, you switch among six minigames (Pong, Falldown, Avalanche, Jump, Tunnel, and Obstacles), playing each one for a few seconds before switching to the next. Your only goal is to keep alive in each minigame for six games in a row.

When you reach Stage II, you're presented with a different screen: one split into two halves, with each half controlling a game. Pass six more sets of games and you reach Stage III, where (as expected) you play three games at a time. The final stage is Stage IV, where you need only pass six more sets to win, leaving you in infinite mode.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I've got a few announcements to make. First off, to all administrators, I decided to change the password to ClrHome's Twitter account. This was after no less than forty-one (41) login attempts. Yes, forty-one. Administrators only, contact me for the new password.

Second, I would like to welcome a new member, corvetta, who will be assisting us in the Public Relations area. We wish her luck, godspeed, and all that other nerdy stuff we say around here that means welcome. Welcome!

Um, well, because Deep Thought will staple me to a tree for posting a blog that's this short in the topic of news, I kind of need to write a bit more. On the personal level, my Legend of Zelda project has been indefinitely halted, and I am resuming progress on Star Trek Multiplayer (link). I hope to have a beta release out soon, but then again, you've all heard that from me before, haven't you.

Yeah, I did it again after going sober and realizing how bad my design skills really were. And so I tried again, with a completely different paradigm for the new ClrHome site: less text, more stuff. It seems to be working pretty well; I like it, at least. It's dark, colorful, and shiny this time, instead of dark, colorful, and muddy (like the last attempt).

The blog also changed, as you can probably see right now, but I can't claim credit for this one. I still need to write my own custom blog display to match the current site theme, but until then, enjoy Blogger's awesome dynamic views! Really, it's amazing. It even almost conforms to W3C standards, but that might be because it uses so much JavaScript. I don't like that last bit, but until I make a replacement, it'll do.

That's right—you can now upload your 8XP files directly to the BBify'r, and it'll detokenize it to the appropriate TokenIDE syntax. It'll even work with TNS-compiled Lua programs for the TI-Nspire series, but on one condition: that the code be unencrypted. Unfortunately, this is already outdated now that Nspire OS 3.0.2 rejects unencrypted TNS files.

Of course, what's the point of being able to open calculator files with the BBify'r if you're not going to prettify it with BBCode? I've finished the Lua and TI-BASIC replacement sheets, so the engine supports them now.

I'd give them the candy if I were you.

The level editor's done. That leaves the rest of my time between now and SAT 2 exams almost entirely open for level design! I'm planning at least 32 or so. Is that a good number?

For once I remembered to back up, and I took that opportunity to make a screenshot of my progress. Here it is, with boulders, bonuses, and half a future level!

Here's yet another webapp I still haven't posted about until now. The Homescreen Image Maker, or "Homer" for short, takes plain text like you see on a calculator homescreen and generates a dynamic image with it. Its applications might be limited (especially since only someone deep in the TI calculator community would use it), but I've personally found it very useful for some of the new tutorials I'm working on.

So when would you use it? Say you had some text you want to show someone in the context of a calculator screen, but you're too lazy to make a screenshot. Well, just type it as it is into Homer, and it'll give you something like this:



The URL would be something like http://clrhome.org/homer/PROGRAM%3AK31337%0D%0A%3ALbl+A%0D%0A%3AClrHome%0D%0A%3ADisp+%22NIcK+DIsabatO%27s%22%2C%22/%3C-3133%2B+NuMber%22%2C%22GuessInG+PrOGraM%22%2C%22%22%2C%22CHOOse+a+nuMber.gif, which you could then easily (or not-so-easily, depending on how many weird characters your text has) modify.

The only major problem with this is that some special characters that have character values corresponding to something a browser or computer OS recognizes as a control character (anything less than 0x20, the space) would need to be put in manually. The biggest issue is with the "store" arrow, which is a %1C you must put in the URL yourself.

Turns out I never did make those updates to AbsIns I had been planning, but I've decided it's for the better. It represents what I could do in late 2009 and early 2010, and I'll keep it as that.

Instead, I finally gave it a decent readme file and sent the final, final package off to ticalc, and created a ridiculously overcompensating project site, thereby ignoring perfectly grounded warnings from fellow calculator programmers that I've been spending more time designing individual websites for each of my programs than I did working on the programs themselves, thus committing a grievous sin against all that we stand for.

To redeem myself, I've finally started on my first major TI-BASIC project in nearly two years. Here's Absolute Madness, a pure-BASIC puzzle/action platform game (sound familiar?) for the TI-83 Plus series. It's essentially an AbsIns engine completely rewritten, with the added features of moving enemies, dimension swapping, and a death sequence—my first attempt at animation for graphics' sake in TI-BASIC.

Yes, dimension swapping, as in in the style of Darl181's Dimension Shift. In my defense, I had the idea before ever seeing his project (which is an awesome game that you should download, by the way).

And of course, since I have only a TI-83 Plus on which to work on, this will have full compatibility with the slower models, but this time I'll actually make a version for you TI-84 Plus users out there. (The screenshot is taken on a TI-83 Plus; click it to see the full power of 15 MHz calculators.) Hope this works out.