[HN Gopher] The State of the TI Community (1999)
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The State of the TI Community (1999)
Author : ForHackernews
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-10-09 11:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ticalc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ticalc.org)
| WD-42 wrote:
| Sweet summer child. If only he could have seen what games had
| become in 2024, where every other is a copy/pasted survival game
| on Unreal 4 pre-released as soon as possible.
| Dwedit wrote:
| What is Ticalc.org doing here? (Yes, I have some featured
| programs there...)
|
| Gotta give huge props to the ticalc.org staff for keeping the
| website up.
| tempodox wrote:
| Why, a platform where you can't use LLMs to generate your code
| has to be the true bar of hackery these days.
| tempodox wrote:
| What a great characterization of that point in time.
|
| As for games, the average time span between releases of stuff I
| find playworthy has grown to over 5 years.
|
| I am still grateful for TIGCC, a port of GCC that cross-compiles
| C to m68k and has a linker for the executable format of my TI-89
| Titanium. It was published on ticalc.org in the previous
| millennium and still works on my Mac to this day.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _the days of the regular NES._ [...] _back then games were
| good. There were only a handful out there and they were well-
| crafted. The emphasis was gameplay and design._ [...] _By the
| time we reach the days of the N64, Playstation, and high-end PC
| 's, we don't have a whole lot._
|
| Two reasons for that:
|
| 1. The NES was just after of the big video game crash of 1983+.
| The video game market had imploded, and only really good games
| would get made, as nothing else would sell _at all_. Games before
| this, like on the Atari 2600, were mostly all crap, if you
| average them all; it's only in hindsight that we mostly remember
| the few good games.
|
| 2. Nintendo had an iron grip on the NES platform, partly as a
| response to said crash. They would only release good games. On
| other later (but still contemporary) popular open platforms, like
| the Commodore 64, quality varied wildly, and crap games were all
| over the place.
|
| +
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_game_crash_...>
| gmurphy wrote:
| Pretty sure this is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jkarneges - would love to
| hear their reflections, 25 years later
| kergonath wrote:
| I am very grateful to to the people behind ticalc.org and the
| whole community. I was in high school at the time, with a brand
| new TI-89 and a lot of free time, and it was wonderful. I am not
| going to name names but the whole community was fantastic and
| very welcoming for a teenage nerd. In retrospect, I wish I had
| enough experience to enjoy these couple of years more than I did.
| To me it felt normal, but now I realise that it was a minor
| golden age.
|
| It is interesting that Justin regrets the NES. I do not remember
| reading that post at the time, but it would have sounded like
| grandpa yelling at clouds to me. The NES was something that
| happened when I was 4 or something; it was prehistoric.
|
| In contrast, my successive TIs were much better than consoles to
| me (though I played Dreamcast and PC games as well). It was
| comparatively easy to dig quite deep into embedded programming
| and whilst I never really did any assembler on it, I used TIGCC
| quite a lot. And programs compiled with it; I still start Phoenix
| II on my TI 89-Ti every now and then.
|
| The good thing is that we can now say that the TI community had
| some very good years ahead in 1999, possibly much better than the
| years before that this post laments. However, I am sad that the
| scene was mostly gone by 2005.
|
| Anyway, it was a good ride.
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(page generated 2024-10-10 23:00 UTC)