Greetings! I am a sophomore in highschool and I recently got involved with some friends in a "Calculator Club" (I know it sounds lame). I saw all the ports and programs on your website and I knew immediately that you guys were one of the most experienced groups on the internet. I am so new to coding and all of this I literally have NO idea what to do. I do not have any previous experience with any programs. Each member in the club was assigned a task; mine is to port and code games. I have no idea what to do but if someone could mentor me I would be more than happy to contribute to this community as well. [/i][/b]

Hey there Roy, in a way I'm glad you didn't post in our general introduction thread because this gives us the room to explore your options a bit!

1. What kind of games are you guys trying to port?
   • Calculator games? Such as TI-83 to TI-84 CE?
   • Flash to Calculator?
   • Mobile to Calculator?
2. What experience do you have with programming?
   • You say you're new to programming, but have you at least explored TI-BASIC a bit?

I honestly thought I'd make a longer list than that but I'm sure others will think of other questions to add! My suggestions, start basic. Create a program that solves math functions, create other programs that'll be more complex but equally static such as a Money Manager or Grade Manager, both of which I've made. Move up to a basic movement puzzle to practice movement and collision detection. Then add in physics, so the character has momentum and even bounces. That'll cover beginner and intermediate things in my opinion.

Once you grasp the concept of programming you can start to understand what's involved in porting something over. You'll be able to think in sections and break programs down to core blocks. If you think of a program as a giant project, you're going to get disinterested, whereas if you think of it as tinier projects that make up a whole you'll be able to see better progress.

Secondly, some site promotion!
We have some fliers you can hand out at meetings. As you guys get a larger group in the club devote more people to porting programs. Assign people certain sub-projects for the larger project at hand. You guys can all collaborate here by using SourceCoder 3 to write programs from your computer. You guys can dump your ROMs and use jsTIfied to run programs as well. Combined with our members knowledge, we can certainly help you guys in just about any capacity.

You can use our contests as basis for club contests as well. We run a contest, assign that contest to your club and encourage them to upload here as well as submit the programs to you. They'd basically get two shots at winning; through the judges at Cemetech and the judges in your club.

If you're willing to spend some money, there are books that will help you along your journey of programming on Texas Instruments calculators written by our own KermMartian.

Great to have you here Andathral! TI-Basic is definitely a good beginners language, and can get fairly complex once you learn enough of it To start learning it, I would recommend Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus (which I'm sure Kerm would've said if I didn't ), and another great website to learn from is TIBasicDev, which is free We will be glad to help you if you need some


Nice! I have actually been wanting to start one of those too (focusing around programming, obviously), but I've been unsure about it. My only worries are that it will sound lame to outsiders, but some friends of mine will probably join, and any of the high schoolers who are actually interested. I know I should probably just go for it, but I'm unsure if I want to...

Welcome Andathral!

TI BASIC, is a really great language to start learning, as it is VERY simple, and it gives results almost instantly! Here is a kind of tutorial that I used that helped me a ton when I started out. http://www.ticalc.org/programming/columns/83plus-bas/cherny/

Things really depend on what calculator you have. If you have a TI 84+ CSE, make sure you have Doors CSE installed. It adds a ton of library commands, or addons to TI-BASIC, so it is a must have. Once, and if you get proficient with BASIC, I suggest going to http://dcs.cemetech.net/index.php/Third-Party_BASIC_Libraries_%28Color%29 to look at what extra commands DCSE has to offer. And If you decide to use that, I am writing some tutorials for XLIBC, so you may want to check those out, when I finish.


If you have a TI 84+ CE, there is no Doors, yet, so you have to program in pure TI-BASIC. There are a few other options for that, but I will let someone more knowledgeable explain about the CE

And then, if you have a TI 84+ SE, TI 84+, TI 83+, or a TI 83+ SE, you should get Doors CS, which essentially adds the same functionality as Doors CSE, thought Doors CS has a bit more commands and options.

In any case, TI BASIC developer is the best place to look if you have any questions, then make a post here for questions. And be sure to follow the advice of everyone else to!

He says that he is new to coding, and I don't think that only means TI-Basic.
So, if you really have no experience in program, I would go online and search for online tutorials for learning how to code.
If you do have experience in coding, I would explore the commands in TI-Basic (most are pretty similar to other programming languages, like while or if) and if you go into the catalog and press the plus sign, you can view the details of a command.
There is also one site I would recommend to learning TI-Basic, which is tibasicdev.wikidot.com. You can find useful tutorials there, detailed descriptions of commands and examples of them, as well as some routines.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them on this site.

P.S. It would be helpful if you could tell us about your project.

Indeed, but there are other systems that teach the thinking behind programming to people without actually wrapping their minds around to much, such as: Lego Mindstorms, Google Blocky and, Code Spells (which is officially being released this December I believe). There are plenty of others I imagine, these are just off the top of my head.

I did actually start programming with languages such as Lego Mindstorms and Scratch (they are both graphic programming languages), and after that, I went to code academy online to learn all of the common languages. However, just going onto google to search how to write a text-based programming like Java won't help you with programming on the calculator, you just need to get the basic concepts like variables, conditionals, etc.

Sorry for such the late reply! It's been an extremely hectic school year so far and I haven't had very much time to respond. Well I usually teach myself everything but I am really stumped on this whole coding business; I have literally no experience coding whatsoever (unless Minecraft counts haha). Anyhow I need somewhere to start. Also, I very much would like to translate portal into Spanish but I don't know how; when I edit the the .xp file in text edit it gives me an error when I try to transfer it through TI Connect (I think I have to reassemble the program or something like that). Anyhow I probably sound like an idiot trying to edit programs in text edit but as I said I teach myself everything through trial and error. But this time I will most definitely need guidance. Thanks in advance

This sounds a lot like the way I started. When I got my TI-84+CSE, I thought I was "programming" by creating a new program and creating this:

Code:

Then I started downloading random programs and I wanted to actually look at the code because I saw that I could edit them. I quickly found out that everything does exactly what it looks like (like Pause ) and started changing stuff to see how it would affect my program. If I didn't really know how to use a command, I would just press + at that command in the program menu for the catalog help. I hope this helps! Basically, if you just look at a bunch of programs and change them a lot, you will end up programming real things. Don't worry about totally ruining the program because you can always resend it to your calculator.

Edit: I do not recommend porting a game yet. I still haven't made a game yet. I tend to forget what each variable I am using (A, B, X, Y, R, ...) and mess up my programs that way.

Yeah, do what they said.

Good luck with your club! I tried to start one, but it crashed-and-burned.

Coding in BASIC is quite easy to learn.

Don't try anything to hard at first, cause if you do and fail, that may ruin some of your passion; I'm not saying, however, not to challenge yourself. Just don't try to do something IMPOSSIBLE, like making a Pokemon clone as your first program, much less in BASIC! (Trust me, I know the hard way! XD)

Good Luck!