The best TI-83 RPGs ever

Fun & Games


The best TI-83 RPGs ever… Carolyn writes –

For some, nothing was more exhilarating in high school than playing a cool calculator game right in front of the teacher’s face while she thinks you’re graphing some crazy parabolic curve. Every kid who’s privy to the beat on the street knows that the first thing to do after persuading your parents to buy you a $100 Texas Instruments graphing calculator is to grab a link cable and get some Space Invaders and Final Fantasy on that sleek machine.

8 thoughts on “The best TI-83 RPGs ever

  1. Jack of Most Trades says:

    In the last month I found 2 for less than $3 each. Replaced the batteries and we’re good to go. One of them was all tricked-out with stickers, which were easily removed (I’d have left them if it was “Hello Kitty”)

  2. Ben says:

    Ahhh… A few years ago in 7th grade (I’m now a rising senior), I was lent a TI-83 by my middle school. It was the best thing a school has ever given me. I learned basic programming concepts by writing quiz programs on it (true, they used GOTOs and I could never figure out how to make an If statement longer than one line, but basic programming concepts nonetheless). My crowning achievement was a working Pong-ish game without a computer player, in which the ball just bounced off the opposite end of the screen. It was something like 500 lines of completely unmaintainable garbage (and there are no scroll bars or line numbers on the TI-83’s editor, so I’m still pretty proud of this). Unfortunately, the school unexpectedly took the calculators away to have them engraved. I never tried to recreate the program.

  3. cassetti says:

    Except i was that geek who bought the TI-85 because it was better than the 82/83 at the time, and saved up freshmen year to buy a TI-89 because It was brand new just released 3 months earlier. The most powerful TI calculator you can take in specific tests because it was the TI-92 with no qwerty keyboard (which was the rule at that time for tests)

    TI-basic is where i learned the foundation of programming (printing out 20 pages of source code for games, and programming them myself by hand since I was too cheap to buy a TI connect cable!

    It wasn’t long before i moved on into assembly language which is how this game above was made (haven’t tested but looks like a lot of time was spent on it)

    I miss the days of programming on that 89 while in the middle of english class (which i still have) – designed the first checkers game in ti-basic for the 89 still available on ticalc.org….. Cool! My profile is still up – “Ranked number 1055 in our list of most downloaded authors all time with 19866 downloads.”

    Ha ha !

    1. Nate says:

      I did the same thing, cassetti!

      Well…not as much as you, but I had certainly gotten my start programming there. And I definitely was programming in English class :D

      But, I was at a rich private school, so soon, *everyone* had a TI-85, because I made the mistake of showing my friends my programs that solved our math and chemistry problems. And it snowballed from there. Then they discovered that you could pass “notes” with it…I don’t know how passing that monolith is more subtle than a small slip of paper or whispering, but they did it nonetheless. And got the calcs banned :(

      And now, I realize that I’m rambling…like an old man, remembering the good old days…when 85 was still more than 83.

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