Some of you noticed that there had been significant downtime last month. Our apologies—the free host used by ClrHome had implemented a new daily usage cap, and it turns out that some of our heavier webapps (IES and ORG in particular) tend to be a bit CPU-intensive when they're compiling. (This only affects the server, not your computer.)

In any case, we've moved ClrHome to a paid hosting plan (finally!). It's been getting close to 100% uptime in the month since we've been here, which is great. For the curious, http://mon.clrhome.org has full uptime stats and downtime logs for all the servers we use (current server at the top). If you'd like to help with the cost of hosting or to support the projects we create, we also have a PayPal account now:

And it's been another big one!

In projects, there were some small utilities released this year, which you can check out here; in addition, we're actively working on some new games that might be interesting. There's Star Trek, back in development courtesy of ACagliano and Sorunome, as well as Maximum Security, a new—well, you'll see.

On the site, we introduced a brand-new webapp called IES that lets you write code, draw images, and manage lists and matrices for your calculator projects online. We also made improvements to several existing ones, like adding autocomplete to the ORG assembly IDE and sprite image generation to Pixelscape. Many new features and a new online resource or two are planned for next year—keep an eye on the Resources page or subscribe to our RSS feed for updates!

On the official side of things, this has been the year that several new calculators have been released. Interesting ones.

Happy New Year to all of you us at ClrHome!

The Pixelscape project has received a few new updates in time for the new year! In particular, more support for exporting sprites as images and text has been added after a request was made for the feature. (As always, if you have an idea for any of our projects, feel free to shoot us an email or tell us via our contact form.)

While editing sprites on Pixelscape, there's now a new button next to Export on the bottom row labeled "Sprite." Clicking will bring up a dialog that lets you export the sprite you're currently editing in one of two ways:

	░░  ░░ ░▓▓░░▓▓░ ░▓█▓▓█▓░ ░▓████▓░  ░████░  ░▓██▓░   ░▓▓░    ░░

• Direct sprite images. You can instantly generate a URL to the current sprite as an image, so you can embed it in posts, pages—anywhere you want! Scaling and image format can both be customized. (The images above (on the left) were generated at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 scale.)
• Unicode sprites. The idea here is that some places (such as text forums) may not allow you to include images in posts. Instead, you can use this new feature to copy-and-paste the sprite as a sequence of Unicode block characters that look like the sprite! On the right above is such a Unicode sprite (in reverse) of the images on the left.

Both features work for monochrome sprites as well as sprites with three and four levels of gray. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave your feedback below!

Here we are again with some more updates on progress for Star Trek Multiplayer.

First things first: the project page at http://clrhome.org/startrek has been given a makeover. This makeover consists of an improved design, more concise information, and an overhauled downloads page.

The actual game has been coming along smoothly. While we still cannot project a completion date, many major features have been completed. All that remains to do is graphics, movement, and the battle engine. In addition, I have decided that the automatic update feature will be abandoned, and replaced by a simple window saying: An update is available. Check out http://clrhome.org/startrek to download.

Additionally, I will, when done, release the source code to a programmer who develops for the TI-84+ Color Screen edition, so that this game may be released in color for that platform.

Stay tuned for more updates.

There has been a slight revision to the intended release schedule for Star Trek Multiplayer. After discussing the practicality of it, Sorunome and I have agreed that it is viable to release a first alpha version of this program in the near future.

This alpha version will contain only a functional automatic-updating system--a system by which the program will automatically download and install later versions of the game onto your calculator with no additional action from you.

It is my hope that this system will encourage people to use my game, and make it easy for them to install future pre-releases, betas, and official versions of the program onto their calculator. Understandably, it is tedious for a developer to offer perhaps ten or twenty pre-releases and keep asking users to update, considering the process associated with that. With my automatic update feature, you no longer need to go through that. Just click on "Update" when prompted and you need do nothing else.

Stay tuned for the first alpha release to be uploaded.

Progress on Star Trek comes slowly, but surely. Coding is already done on a good portion of the client side program, and a list of message types and configurations for packets the server sends and receives has been prepared and uploaded to me and Sorunome's shared project directory.

Some screenshots for the program are below.

Additionally, I will be implementing an automatic update function in the game. Every time your calculator connects to our server, it will silently check for what the latest version we have posted is of the calculator-side program. If our version is newer than yours, you will be given the option to update the program, right from your calculator, right there. No downloading the game, transferring it yourself. All automatic. Of course, all updates will be made available for manual download on the project page as well, for those who don't already have the game on their devices.


The screenshot of the splash screen for Star Trek MP.


The screenshot of the program icon for Star Trek MP.

Star Trek Project Page
http://clrhome.org/startrek

Many of you probably thought this project was dead. Well, psyke. It is alive and well.

Star Trek's entire conceptual design has been given a complete overhaul. Sure, the game will still run as you would expect. But, under the hood, something a whole lot different will be going on.

Instead of having each individual unit do all of its updating and incrementing, then sending transmissions to every single calculator on the network, which would require finding enormous amounts of memory to store usernames and calculator ID's (similar to an IP address, but utilized by CALCnet to identify a calculator), I have decided to put most of this processing on the server. Every calculator communicates only with the server, not with another unit. The server handles figuring out what data it should respond with, or what to do with the transmission.

To exemplify this, assume that I have sent off a message to the server, asking for the other objects around me on the server. The server, in turn, responds with only the objects in my sector (immediate area). This includes terrain. This prevents the calculator from becoming overloaded with all that data for objects so far away I really don't need info on them.

On the visible side, there are some notable new features planned. First and foremost is existence of user accounts. Each player must have an account in order to join the server, for the purpose of storing save files. Players can log in, register, and change their username and password from right on their calculator. Additionally, instead of holding game saves in an appvar on your calculator, save files are kept on the server, associated with your account. When you join the server, your save file gets downloaded to your calculator. When you disconnect, your calculator uploads the most recent save data back onto the server. This is another attempt of mine to minimize the memory used by this game.

Last but not least, welcome to the dev team Sorunome, and thanks a million for your assistance with this project. :)

The image here is a mockup of the title screen to the upcoming game Maximum Security. As with a lot of other things in the game, the highlight around START will be another unnecessary animation in the actual program, which I'm working on now. This idea got big fast—it was originally meant to be a quick little project to prove I'm still alive, and here we are a year later!

As promised, here's a screenshot of MaxSec. (Don't you just love CamelCase?) It's not entirely new (having been taken two weeks ago), but it's certainly an update on the last one.

Since there's a lot going on in this screenshot, here's a quick run-through of the things that the player encounters in traversing the demo level:

• Water starts pouring into the upper part of the level.
• Turret (aimed at the player) launches a bullet.
  • Bullet strikes a boulder and bounces off.
  • Bullet strikes a dynamite crate, which triggers a chain reaction, clearing the level.
  • Water from upper part of level can now flow down the new corridor.
• Player pushes boulder onto turret so it's safe to walk by.
• Player collects coins, opening the exit door (which changes visibly).
• As player is underwater, his breath count (white "health" bar on the right) drops bit by bit. (Kinda proud of that bubble animation myself.)
• As water covers the entire map, it leaves some air pockets which player uses to replenish his breath count.

The water behaves a bit oddly in this level, but anything I try to fix the water algorithm seems to leave me with a fantastic RAM clear. I'll probably just design levels in a way that it doesn't look quite as odd, or call it something other than water. Why not acid?

So here it is—our latest major project. More screenshots are yet to come as the remaining parts of the project get finished!

Before we get any further, here's the download link. (It's a multipurpose unit converter, in case you didn't get the hint.)

Look, I know there are tons of helpful little programs on ticalc.org, and many of them do exactly the same thing. I realize that unit converters are a lot like the many other types math/science utilities swamping ticalc.org. Just like quadratic solvers, these things have so burdened the famous calculator file archive that there's a whole category dedicated to them, all in TI-BASIC and all for the TI-83/84 Plus series. (For the record, I have a quadratic solver there too—click if you dare.)

But this one is hopefully different. It was made to pack as much stuff in as small a package as possible, so here's a single, 2,977-byte program that has 132 units spanning 15 different categories:

Length Area Capacity/volume Mass Speed

Pressure Energy Power Force Temperature

Charge Current Radiation Time Angle

Thanks to math, I can claim this program supports 1,170 different conversion functions in less than 3 KB. And there you have it—yet another unit converter to grace the halls of ticalc.org.

If you've seen any list of the games I've worked on, you know that what I really love making are puzzle platformers. They're even more fun to make in Axe, where there's plenty of speed available for a nice physics engine.

Well, despite the Contra project still being in a sort of limbo state, we announced a new game tentatively called "Turret" back in January. It would be the dogpile of all that's fun to work with in a platformer, with features such as water levels, dynamite, and movable boulders. And turrets—lots of them, and lots of bullets to come with them.

But "Turret" was just a working title, and it didn't come with a decent storyline. Thanks to codebender on Omnimaga, however, the game now has both a real title and a real story!

Trapped in a maximum-security prison against your will and without knowing why, your fate is changed by an explosion that rips open your cell. All of the guards and other inmates have mysteriously disappeared, leaving you alone to find your way out of the compound.

Passing through room by room, your journey is fraught with dangerous equipment and materials once meant to keep prisoners in check. You must navigate around vaporizing laser arcs, falling stacks of boulders, exploding crates of dynamite, gun turrets that track your movements, and dangerous liquids pouring through the walls and threatening to drown you.

There are no weapons or tools at your disposal. All you have is your own ingenuity; use it to manipulate the hazardous equipment in each level to serve your own ends, to help you escape. Find your way through the corridors and discover what happened to the compound—and why you were taken there in the first place.

Fresh animated screenshots of Maximum Security are coming soon!

While BBCode may be one of the most popular languages for forum post authoring, not everyone posts their code on forums. Since HTML is a much more widely used markup language for the web (and BBCode compiles to HTML anyway), making the BBify'r prettify your code as HTML has been one thing I've been planning to do for a while.

The feature has finally been added: the BBify'r project, which was first announced two years ago as a webapp to syntax-color your calculator code to as BBCode so you can paste it in a forum, now generates HTML (and a live preview!) so you can paste it anywhere else. It works with all the languages the BBify'r has always worked with. Z80 assembly, Axe, TI-BASIC, and Lua are there by default, but you can always easily create your own language rules using the BBify Builder tool (which I apparently forgot to post a news about).

The only problem now is that the name of the webapp no longer means anything. It's not just BBCode anymore!

Our online TI-BASIC/Axe/Grammer IDE just got a major update. Among the new features are editors for 8XL (List) and 8XM (Matrix) variables, as seen in the screenshots on the right.

As always, you can either drag-and-drop an appropriate file into the webapp or create a new list or matrix using the + tab. Both editors take the form of a simple chart, allowing you to edit list/matrix elements individually or the entire structure at once, using TI-BASIC syntax (such as {1,2,3,4} for lists and [[1,2][3,4]] for matrices).

Try it out here, and if you have any questions, bug reports, or suggestions, feel free to post below!

It has been a while since Kerm Martian revolutionized the Texas Instruments calculator community with his CALCnet software and the global CALCnet protocol, which was the first step towards allowing TI programmable calculators to use the Internet. Several months later, CALCnet is the most widely used networking protocol for performing calculator-to-calculator communication, as well as calculator-to-Internet communication. It has been used in games (like "Obliterate"), chatting programs (like "CHAT"), a fledgling browser ("Gossamer"). Many more are on the way.

Kerm has announced that he intends to redesign CALCnet to make it more feature-rich and to possibly remove the need for software to be running on a computer. Currently, you need to have a program running on your computer while your calculator is plugged in to access the Internet. While CALCnet currently has no vulnerabilities, when these changes are made, some may be introduced that would allow others to send "malware" to your calculator.

Why, you may ask, would someone do this? Well, there are some people who would do it just because they can. Or a jealous classmate who wants to do better than you on a test and decides to install something that will mess with your calculator's mathematical ability (changing the number of decimal places it rounds to, or making all answers off by a certain percentage). For your information, these types of "malware" already exist, as pranks, but require physical access to the calculator you want to install them on. But CALCnet may change that as it develops. Every new technology can be used for evil.

So, I endeavored to create a Firewall and Malware detector. This program will intercept CALCnet packets and check the sender ID against a list of blocked calculators. If the sender is on the list, the packet gets cleared immediately and never reaches your calculator. For now, you will need to add and remove entries from your block list manually, but when I learn about the new CALCnet design, I will endeavor to allow this program to automatically connect to CALCnet, and download a block list filled with "known threats".

My program will also have a malware scanner. "Prank" programs that can actually cause your calculator (or your grades) harm, such as the OFFBY1 virus (a program that makes all answers be off by plus or minus 1), will be scanned for, as well as tidbits of code that can cause physical hardware damage. These will be included in a "virus definitions file" that comes with the program. For now, you will need to check the site for updates yourself, but again, once I learn about the new CALCnet design, I will endeavor to have this program update the virus definitions automatically.

Check out my project page for more: http://clrhome.org/blastav/.

As we said in the previous post, the first items planned for the Integrated Editor System were ways to edit image data in the webapp. That's the second major stage of the project, and it's finally finished. You can now upload, convert, and edit your sprites and images directly in the online TI-BASIC/Axe/Grammer editor!

The new features actually come in two forms. The first is an integrated sprite editor, allowing you to design your hex sprites on-the-fly. It's like a simplified version of the Pixelscape sprite editor, except that instead of showing you the code for the sprite, the code in your program is updated as you edit. Just put your cursor inside some sprite data and the sprite editor pops up automatically to show you what that sprite looks like. (It only works in Axe mode right now, but will be added to the Grammer mode soon.)

The second form is a full converter and editor for 96-by-64 images. Like with programs, you can drag-and-drop an image file of any popular image format—GIF, PNG, JPG, or 8XI (Picture variable)—and IES will open it for editing, scaling it down and converting it to calculator-friendly colors if need be. You can also create a blank image by selecting "Image" after clicking the + tab.



If you have images to convert for use in a TI-BASIC project or just to load onto your calculator, this is where IES comes in handy, with the added bonus of being able to edit and preview the converted Picture variable in two, three, or four levels. This is an image that was scaled down from 160 pixels wide and high.

Currently, the image editor is very simple. The only editing "tool" available is a pen tool that draws broken lines. Better generic image-editing tools such as rectangles, ellipses, and flood-fill are planned soon; after all, shouldn't an online image editor have at least the features of a calculator program?

It's been a while since I've finished a calculator game, and it's time to fix that. There's a game in development that's had some progress, but there's a problem—I'm not entirely sure what I'm even doing with it.

Sometimes I have an idea of what to make (such as a complete ripoff of an existing game on a different platform), and sometimes I stuff as much stuff into a program as it can hold and hope it comes out looking like some sort of game. This is the second case. I'm tentatively calling this project "Turret" because turrets will be a central factor, but it sounds pretty lame.

Here's the gist of the game. You're trapped in a series of rooms, and you want to get out through a series of doors. There are also turrets programmed to shoot at you so you don't get out.

You have no weapons of your own, but you can always try to get the turrets to shoot you in a direction you want, triggering things like dynamite crates and boulders. There are some other features that might come in handy, or kill you:

• Water levels (and swimming). There will likely be a breath count, where the player dies if he stays underwater for too long.
• Zappers. Energy fields. Instant death. Whatever you want to call it.
• Dynamite crates are triggered by turret bullets and can destroy nearby steel crates (but not solid blocks which form the wall).
• Boulders to push around. Bullets bounce off of them in various directions, which adds a skill factor, I guess.
• Coins. Collect them all to open the door!

Each of these is already partially implemented. A full level editor is also planned (and mostly complete, in fact). All this, and I haven't even figured out what the point or name of the game will be.

For me personally, no code editor will ever beat programming with a calculator in my hand. But with the ORG project I've learned that sometimes computer-based tools are more helpful. Since the token-based languages, such as TI-BASIC, Axe, and Grammer, are even more popular ways to develop programs for calculators, I've decided to work on a project to bring them online too, in a full-featured programming environment.

The Integrated Editor System will be a complete IDE for TI-BASIC, Axe, and Grammer projects. (Other languages may be supported in the future.) Though there are still many things to be added, the features I've been testing for the Axe mode already promise to make IES a far more ambitious project than even the ORG assembly IDE.

The structure of the app takes a significantly different approach from ORG. Instead of keeping a simple list of files, IES allows you to manage multiple projects, each of which can be marked for any of the three languages. Each project can then contain as many files as needed, organized by tabs similar to ORG's. To make it easier to start using the IES editor, you can just drag-and-drop your current project directly into the page—whether it's a text file, 8XP program, or even a ZIP archive!

The Axe mode already features full syntax highlighting; TI-BASIC and Grammer will sport the same colors as soon as I finish the highlighting rules for those languages. In all three modes, IES has full autocomplete and syntax hinting features (providing a tooltip to remind you of the order of arguments for a command), with data pulled from the Catalog project.

Here's what it looks like for TI-BASIC:



Of course, you can do the same thing for Axe:



And Grammer:



So what comes next? Here are some things that are definitely planned for the near future:

• Inline sprite editor (think stripped-down version of Pixelscape)
• Full image editor for 8XI and other image files
• Sharing code through the BBify'r
• Editors for real- and complex-number, list, and matrix variables
• A hex editor for binary files (such as appvars with data)

I'm still building up my list of planned features, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!