So, recently I was poking around on Google and decided to search for "calculator games." To my surprise, Cemetech was not to be found on the first page of the search results.

Now, it might be argued that this isn't a bad thing, as we here on Cemetech want users who will actually participate in making cool things and teaching cool stuff rather than users who are just looking for something to do to pass the time in math class. However, I would argue that calculator games can act as a good entry point onto the forum. I, personally, found Cemetech after seeing that one of my upperclassmen had Pac-Man on his calculator, and then Googling calculator games. After trying a few out, I quickly wanted to try to make my own. I tried to make a simple bouncing-ball simulator with the C toolchain. I didn't actually make an account until joining the Minecraft server, though that's probably an issue that should be addressed separately. Additionally, the download counter for programs is at least a small part of the incentive for creating new calculator games, as nobody wants to write code nobody will use.

So, let's take a look at the search results that are outranking Cemetech, and consider why they are outranking Cemetech:
Search results for "calculator games":
1. http://tiwizard.com/games-for-ti-83-plus-and-ti-84-plus/ - Has exclusively monochrome programs. The last file upload appears to be from 2014.
2. https://www.ti84calcwiz.com/ti84plusce-games/ - I'll discuss this one later. Has reuploaded Cemetech programs.
3. https://www.ti89.com/get-17-awesome-calculator-games.php - For monochrome, links to Cemetech archive pages. In that sense, it's more like a "curated" version of Cemetech, which is a positive thing in my opinion.
4. https://www.ticalc.org/pub/83plus/basic/games/ - Is ticalc. Interestingly, the link is for BASIC games, even though you would think that assembly games would be more popular.
5. https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2017/09/04/gta-calculator-game/ - An article about calc games, with no downloads.
6. http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/games - Is tibasicdev.
7. https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Put-games-on-a-graphing-calculator/ - Article about installing CSE/monochrome games with TI-Connect.
8. https://ostermiller.org/ti82/games.html - OC TI-82 games from 2006. Jeffitus likes it so I'll trust that it's good.
9. http://www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com/calculator-games.html - A completely unrelated article.
10. One of ti84calcwiz's YouTube tutorials. Perhaps Cemetech could do something similar, or direct more attention to TLM's tutorials.
11. A Google images segment
12. https://www.polygon.com/history-of-fun-podcast/2018/7/16/17577242/the-history-of-ti-83-calculator-gaming - An podcast about the history of calculator games.
13. https://www.simplemachine.co/game/calculator-the-game/ - An Android game involving a calculator. I played it for a bit but then uninstalled it because I kept opening it instead of my real calculator app.
14. https://www.calculatorti.com/ti-games/ti-83-plus-ti-84-plus/mirageos/ - For monochrome calcs. Probably reuploads but I'm too lazy to check.
15. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sm.calculateme&hl=en_US - Google play link for said Android game.
...
Looking ahead a bit, apparently Cemetech does not actually show up in the first 10 pages of Google search results for "calculator games". Guess I should have checked that before typing out the first 15 results, but whatever. Considering that one of the main focus points of Cemetech is calculator games, there's something wrong here. It should show up at least somewhere. At least we appear in the "related searches", I guess.

Alright, what about "TI 84 Plus CE Games"?
1. https://www.ti84calcwiz.com/ti84plusce-games/ - See below.
2. https://www.ticalc.org/pub/84plusce/asm/games/ - Is ticalc again. This time it's the assembly games page.
3. https://www.ticalc.org/pub/84pluscse/basic/games/ - ticalc again, but with BASIC games.
4. https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Put-Games-on-a-TI-84-Plus-CE/ - An article, written by the owner of ti84calcwiz.
5. https://www.ticalculators.net/downloads/ti-84-plus-ce-games/ - Hold up, this is an exact copy of ti84calcwiz. And both are owned by the same person?
6. https://www.ticalculators.net/geometry-dash-ti84plusce/ - An article about Geometry Dash on ticalculators.net. This also has a reupload on the page.
7. https://www.cemetech.net/programs/84pce/basic/games - Cemetech's BASIC games archives. For whatever reason, the assembly game archives are listed as the second option in the "more links" section. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, as "game" appears 149 times on the BASIC games section, and 150 times on the assembly games section, and "CE" appears 38 times in the BASIC section, and 73 times in the assembly section, so you would think that the assembly section would be listed first.


ti84calcwiz.com, and a seemingly identical website, ticalculators.net, contain reuploads of CE games. No offense to andressevilla, the owner of both sites, but I personally believe that they harmful to individual program creators, end users, and the community as a whole.

First, the programs seem to be reuploaded without permission, though it's possible I am wrong about this. Judging by SAX messages, the programs appear to be downloaded from Cemetech. One of the programs, 1010 by KingInfinity, even expressly forbids this in its license. Most of the other programs on the site seemed to be released without a license originally, which does not mean that you can do whatever you want to with the files. The site is also making a profit off of these programs by running ads, which is taking money away from Cemetech and other sites.

Secondly, the readme files and the source originally included with the programs are not available in the reupload. This is harmful to the end user for obvious reasons.

Third, there is no way for the user to communicate with the program author. On Cemetech, downloaders can communicate with authors via SAX, DM, or project threads for suggestions and issues, as well as over GitHub or email if listed in the readme. On this site, the only way to communicate is to send andressevilla an email and hope that it gets relayed, or to Google the name of the author listed.

Lastly, there is no way for users to contribute to the programs list or (EDIT: apparently there is an upload button; I'm just blind) interact with other users. Here on Cemetech we have SAX and the forums, and anyone can upload a program as long as it meets our quality standards. ti84calcwiz users who would otherwise join the community might not do so because it's not possible on that site.

Despite these flaws, the site is still popular, with one particularly vocal Reddit user recently calling Cemetech "trash" in comparison. I think the main two reasons for this are the site's ease of use and its flashiness.

On Cemetech, if you want to find CE games, you have to click downloads, then find the CE in the list, then hit "Assembly Programs," which is probably confusing to the average user, then select games. Once you do, you have to find the game that you want, then click the tiny download link. Then you have to extract the file, and most of the time run the program once before realizing that you need to download the C libraries as well, and then download and install those as well.

On the other hand, the process on ti84calcwiz is to find the game you want, click the clearly marked download button, and send all the files over. It's much more streamlined. The page is also much flashier, with screenshots of each program to make it easier to find the ones you want.

The creator of the website also frequently advertises it on reddit, and has his own subreddit, /r/ti84hacks. I don't mind this as much as the website as it is an actual community with actual questions and productive discussions as opposed to just stealing content.

So, what can Cemetech do? Firstly, if one of your programs is on ti84calcwiz, and (unlike Mateo) you do not want your programs to be there, you should probably politely request of andresseville that your program be removed, or request that a readme and a link to the original Cemetech topic or download be provided.

Next, we could try to identify the reason that the archives page is not showing up in search results. My personal theory is that the word "game" appears too many times on the page and Google thinks that something fishy is going on like keyword stuffing, though I don't really have anything to back that up.

We could also try making it easier to find the games. On the archive root directory page that users see immediately after clicking "Downloads", we could add two large banners side by side for CE and monochrome games that link to the assembly games directory for the respective calculators. We could also have the banners redirect to a different page, which would be more "curated." It could be similar ti84calcwiz's interface and show a screenshot next to the title of the program and a one-click download program. It could also have multiple categories, like "Most Popular", "Newest", "Featured", "Random", and "Top Rated" (if the rating system is ever improved). This would also have the benefit that people would be more likely to link to it, which would help improve search engine ranking.

If we really wanted to go for ease of use, we might be able to use WebUSB to send programs to a calculator using only a web browser. Adriweb already has a proof of concept for such a system. Considering that a large number of students are now using school-issued laptops which either do not support TI-Connect CE, in the case of Chromebooks, or are not possible to install programs on due to regulations. It would also allow users to install programs from an Android tablet or other mobile device using an OTG adapter.

Anyways, thanks for reading all of that. I feel like I need to put a conclusion here but really have no idea what to say, so yeah.

I'm not usually supportive of people being mean to newbies, but he called Cemetech trash and referred to LibLoad as "some crap". He clearly has no appreciation for how much work actually has to go into making fancy games work on his CE so its fair game now.
I'm a little surprised that Cemetech doesn't pop up when looking for calculator games, given the amount of traffic it generates (although I guess ti84calcwiz probably gets a ton of traffic, since it only hosts the cream of the crop in terms of calculator games)
I really like the webUSB idea, it would make it wayy simpler for high schoolers to put games on their calculators, which as we all know, is the gateway to getting a computer science degree

As far as SEO/usability improvement of the archives here goes, boy howdy do I have ideas that relate. I'll have a go at writing them up tomorrow, and feel free to poke me to do so. Misc notes:

• Much more visible download links
  
• Make screenshots more prominent
  
• Better searchability
  
• Easier navigation to similar items by whatever metric
  
• Pointers to popular items

For licensing, calculator programs have historically been very permissive and generally lax, likely at least in part because a common distribution method is transferring programs directly between calculators- leaving little room for extra documentation or requirements. In practice, "no license" often does mean "do whatever you want," though there is ample room for the author to say "you can't do that" to anything they dislike and wield their copyright accordingly.

If my understanding of intellectual copyright is correct, the software's author retains sole distributive rights unless permission is granted. This permission may be implied by using a file upload system, which grants (for example) Cemetech a distribution license, or by the presence of a license. In the absence of a license, Cemetech's license takes effect for all downloads, in the presence of one, that license supercedes Cemetech's. Even for freeware, you cannot simply nab someone's software, post it on your website, in many case not cites the author, and get away with it. And for what it's worth, I think it's unethical and ought to be not allowed. Those people spent a lot of time and effort on their programs only to have them used illicitly on a website with people who are then trash talking their community and their software.

On another note, the Cemetech downloads bit definitely needs a UI restructure. It can be a bit hard to navigate. I think people should have an option to specify what calculators they own and when clicking Downloads they get a search form that searches only for results for the calculator models they own. Under that, links to the archives folders for the models you own, and then under that a "View all" link.

I think better archives searching is in order. I also support having a way to change how the downloads are sorted. Sorting the downloads by popularity by default puts programs that people like more towards the top.

Having the option to sort by age is important so that newer programs are featured.

Sorting by rating is good, lest some terrible program with lots of downloads exists.

Sorting by alphabetical order is also probably good, just so people have options.

This could all be done on the client, with basically zero impact on the server.

Edit: From the front page, it takes me 4 clicks to download a file. The pages google is recommending only require one interaction, maybe two.

Hey guys. I am Andres Sevilla, the creator of TI84CalcWiz. I just wanted to respond to your concerns and clarify a few things.

So, about the "particularly vocal Reddit user", bernard-young. Yes, he said some things that were negative towards Cemetech and a lot of people seem to have taken this personally. I think he has learned his lesson, we don't need to keep bashing him (he updated the post - apparently he is getting sent "nasty DMs"??)

Giving credit to authors: ACagliano has stated multiple times (here and on Reddit) that my website "in many case not cites the author". Could you clarify what you mean by that? I have taken care to always give credit to the authors, and the names are bolded on the download page. If I am missing something, let me know and I'll fix it ASAP.

Reupload issues: I am not 100% sure why my site is being singled out here - TIWizard (which has been around for over a decade) and other such sites have been doing the exact same thing and receiving far more visitors. I talked with a few people before starting the site, and my understanding about it is similar to Tari's. Commandblockguy seemed to prefer the "curated" content of TI89.com with links to Cemetech uploads, which is something I can certainly do. I actually downloaded these programs from TICalc.org, and some of the games are not available on Cemetech (Androides, for example). I can definitely do this with direct links to downloads hosted on Cemetech and TICalc.org servers. It would certainly save me money on my cloud hosting bandwidth...but then again it would increase that of Cemetech and TICalc.org. I'll also look into adding a download counter, as requested. I'll look into the issue with KingInfinity's program as well.

SEO: My website ranks high because of over two years of work on my part. There is no magical formula to ranking high on Google, but I would be happy to help out Cemetech. It was mentioned that perhaps Cemetech should make videos similar to mine - Kerm already has made many, far more than I do (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BIOzCgumQM), I just spent a lot of time and effort to outrank them. And about publicizing TLM's channel - I already do whenever I have the opportunity. One of his videos is the pinned comment on my games video and he is featured on my channel sidebar (and on Reddit, and parts of my website).

Having a community: Users can (and have) submit to TI84CalcWiz, there is a button for it on the download pages. And the forum is the r/TI84Hacks subreddit, where we talk about programming, help, tutorials, etc. Feel free to join us!

About TICalculators.net: Yes, I own that website as well. It's all a bit complicated, but the plan was to make that site have a tutorial for every game, like a more user friendly readme with a video (such as the Geometry Dash game mentioned here). I was also planning to build it into a reference for learning more about calculators and how to program them.

I am working on a few things in the background to encourage more authors to upload on the site and to give back to the authors that do. Please let me know if you all have any other concerns or questions!

~ Andres

On the technical aspects, yes you're generally correct. My main point was that in practice many people are willing to ignore some or many kinds of redistribution and ultimately only the author can enforce their copyright- many don't bother.

https://www.ti84calcwiz.com/programs/
Much of the stuff here, Cesium, ICE, and a few others are posted without citation given.

My issue is less a "I want to be an a**" and more of a "you could get in trouble for this if people decided to fight you on it". You literally took software, repackaged and provided a download (distribution) for it when the license provided specifically stated that this could not be done for this software. Personally, if someone did that to one of my programs, I would find it a tad disrespectful. Also, providing a totally different source for a download removes the software from the likelihood that the author will see any questions or concerns about it, leaving you (and others you may have with you) to have to try to help people with software you may not fully understand. This is more or less why licenses included with software forbid distribution done by anyone who isn't the author without consent. It's for debugging and troubleshooting issues, not for devs not wanting to share.

My bottom line is that if the author has given permission or performed the upload themselves, it's one thing, but if either of this isn't true, and the license says you cannot distribute, then your "Download" button should be a link to an official distribution, not one of your own. That's the safest way to handle that.

Hey ACagliano. The programs actually do have authors listed - the page you linked to doesn't contain direct download links but links to pages such as these: https://www.ti84calcwiz.com/mathprograms/algebra-one-suite/, where the author is listed. I can definitely add an author column to the program list page as well if you would like.

And about your other concerns, I hear you, and I spoke with some other users on SAX. I will be working on some improvements to include the original download links as mirrors or "alternative links" to TICalc.org, game specific instructions, and author contact details.

I am currently on vacation, but I will try to start work on these improvements soon. TICalculators.net is sort of my beta site for TI84CalcWiz, so the plan is to implement the changes there and then move them over to TI84CalcWiz.

Isn't the two domains extra overhead you dont need? why not ti84calcwiz.com/beta or /b? So it's one domain. Or log into your domain provider and point beta.ti84calcwiz.com to ti84calcwiz.com/beta.
Certainly don't have to do that, just a suggestion.

I mean, if that was the goal, I'd probably just develop it on a localhost but I see what you are saying. I have two separate domains because I was planning for TICalculators.net to be a separate site with more references and tutorials for all calculator models (not just the CE, as on TI84CalcWiz). I have literally pages of plans for both sites, but school has been taking up most of my time right now.

I think you're missing the point that the authors didn't give you permission to re-upload and get traffic off their work - if you had ads on your websites, for example, you'd be making money off other people's work. The good-faith thing to do would be to take down every program you don't have explicit permission to redistribute, and only add programs in the future for which you explicitly get permission. The bad-faith thing would be to (per Tari's note) wait until each of the authors sends you a cease-and-desist.



I'm very enthused about this, because I think we have a lot of great content that people have a very hard time finding, as commandblockguy and others have said.

Eventually, maybe if we (Lionel Debroux and I, basically) ever finish this project, we would implement it for TI-Planet archives, as we also think it would simplify things for students/visitors. At least it would on Chromebooks and macOS where nothing has to be done first. On Linux, there's a small thing to do to grant the USB perm (easy enough), and on Windows it's the usual driver PITA... Right now, the current state of things on this repo is that it's a PoC that showed it could work But that's about it.

Yup, WebUSB has worked for several years, but as usual, the bottleneck is time for implementing stuff

Reimplementing full-featured file handling and asynchronous (that's the main change, and it's a huge one) communication using 4 protocols (3 for recent models), for all TI calculator models and a different set of cables (here, only the USB cables, and new network-based cables, would make sense) is a lot of work.
If anybody else is interested, I do have a detailed "design/architecture/ideas/todo list" GDoc, already shared to several members of the community
Using Emscripten to produce JS / WebAssembly is the way to go, writing JS/TS/etc. by hand is insane and would tie the code to a browser environment or the likes of Node.js / Deno, yielding monstrosities.
libti* is dozens of thousands of lines of C++ code with a C API; in this day and age, memory-unsafe languages are slowly, and rightfully, becoming out of favor, so the replacement should be written in Go or Rust... adding to the workload of the conversion.

It would certainly be nice to be able to compile libti* as much as possible to WASM, but we'll have issues with libusb things. Probably if enough effort/time is spent, we'd reach something usable.
But in the meantime, something as minimal as possible (and for instance, targeting only the CE calcs) in TypeScript, like I've started, could probably be done in much less time.

Indeed, it's easier when simplifying the problem space a lot by targeting a single family of models, a single cable, a single protocol, and use the wrong high-level implementation language ^^
On top of that, corner-cutting (shunting multiple cardinality for calculators, shunning stubbed layers paving the way to implement multiple models / cables / protocols) would save a relatively small amount of work, but would make the situation even worse, and would be more accurately portrayed as "cornering".

That said, of course, simplifying the problem space, without excessive corner-cutting, is the right approach for building an early prototype. In fact, that's precisely what I'd do too, in order to get my feet wet, if I were to implement something in Rust or Go. However, the making of usable, portable software able to fulfill a larger variety of use cases is a different matter, as we know...

But we're straying off-topic, and that's my fault. Or yours for pointing me this topic ?

A bottom line relevant to this topic, though: of course, Web-based computer <-> TI calculator communication software is best done as a collaborative project, where multiple sites can leverage and contribute to a common FLOSS code base. Any site can integrate the core communication functionality into its archives system, the way it sees fit. And of course, I'd be willing to participate in such a project, even if only as some form of advisor

It's no secret that search engines like smaller and faster pages better.

Here are some of the biggest size savings I found:

• Merging the logo and motto pngs into the banner could save 53+2.7=55.7kb.
  
• Simple jpg compression shaved off 35 kb off the calculators banner image, and I was being conservative with my settings.
  
• Removing unnecessary whitespace and quotes from the 84+CE ASM games page HTML saved 32.7kb.
  
• Running uglifyjs (what I had on hand) on saxjax.js saved 21kb.
  
• Removing lazy inline CSS from the 84+CE ASM games page saved approx 11kb*
  
• Removing whitespace from the CSS file sent with every page saved 5.4kb
  

These are just a few, and I wasn't exactly trying too hard. I saved 160.8 kb from a 476 kb page. That's pretty significant.

*I just did a find and replace action here, this number is incredibly approximate. Most of it comes from the table there, where every element has inline CSS for some reason. This inline CSS stuff on tables is everywhere on Cemetech and it drives me a little crazy :V

Why are you so intent on hosting other people's programs on your website without asking them? This would be a step in the right direction, but it would be much better if you didn't host them at all. Just because a program doesn't have a license doesn't mean you can take it and put it on your website. It may be legal, but it definitely isn't an honest thing to do.


I wasn't aware of this. Are you sure that these are actual metrics taken into consideration by search engines, or is it that less popular websites generally have less effort put into making them faster/smaller? I can see how if someone were to only look at the actual search results, they might find a statistically significant trend and draw the wrong conclusion. Remember correlation does not imply causation


That may be so, but then you would lose the whole title+banner system (see the lego subforum's banner)


That's lossy compression. 'Nuff said.


I completely agree that the JS and CSS should be minified before being hosted.


I believe that's because most tables on the site go through some pretty-printing php beforehand, which is where the inline CSS gets added.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html

Alright, so merge them there too? This is a pretty huge size save.


I could /barely/ tell the difference here. The image is a photograph that is already a little fuzzy.


Alright, move the added CSS to a class, and add the class through PHP. You're still saving loads of bytes. Even better, do the prettifying with CSS selectors. I don't see why this is an issue. I did it in my mock-up with barely any work :V

Oh, looks like another occurrence of that old debate
TL;DR for newcomers: for the purpose of archiving knowledge, a combination of:
* linking external sources with appropriate author information, as a primary source of information;
* serving a local backup with a warning that it might be outdated (unless the author does really not want it)
is a good tradeoff.
Don't be too quick criticizing re-hosting, since it's a fact that it's useful. For your peer users, booing third-party re-hosting, and attempting to prevent re-hosting of one's programs, is not a constructive attitude to hold


I can't speak for andressevilla, but... have you thought about the fact that in the long run, for the sake of the community and users (preserving people's work and knowledge), having more backups of content - and in that case, publicly accessible backups - is the right thing to do ?
Old-timers of the community have already seen variations of the same bad movie a number of times over the years: unrivaled work which disappeared from its original location, and can only be found through third-party re-hosting...
Another, related bad movie, which has historically been far more frequent, was people losing months, if not years, of their good work because of a computer / calculator crash, and they either usually did not have any backup, or sometimes had a broken one. It's a fantastically de-motivating event, leaving the developers with a thoroughly broken heart, and it's the death knell for the affected projects, at least the native code ones: few go through the pain of rebuilding the ASM / Axe source using a disassembly of newer binaries downloadable from other sources (primarily where the author uploaded them, sure, but probably not always) as a starting point.

A prime example of the usefulness of re-hosting as a secondary source of information, which has been useful to me in the recent years, long after the original source disappeared: Samuel Stearley's TI-68k programs.
Samuel Stearley was one of the best TI-68k programmers, whose work in some areas, such as CAS, with his Hail Equation Writer, containing a much faster reimplementation of one of the deepest routines in AMS's CAS, namely next_expression_index(), or his non-evaluating and therefore much faster list / matrix item ("fastlist"), is unmatched.
Some of his other work includes further optimizing, after some work by Greg Dietsche and myself, the PuCrunch decompression routine used by the SuperStart and ttstart generic launchers (both usually use the fast / larger version, even if it's 500+ bytes) and the pstarters (program-specific launchers, which usually use the small 200+-byte, but slow, version)... i.e. launchers for thousands of compressed programs.
At some point, he quit updating his work on ticalc.org: https://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/zipview?89/asm/math/hailbeta1.zip;Readme.txt makes it clear that it's intentional, and I know for a fact that the ticalc.org version is an outdated one - not to mention that this ticalc.org archive provides no source code for his top-class work.
The original URL for his site was http://www.calvin.edu/~sstear70/ , which has been 404 for a long time. Then, he used www.nyall.net , which has redirected to www.stearley.org for most of a decade... which has redirected to http://www.calvin.edu/~sstear70/ for years, certainly. Back to square one

Samuel Stearley used to rant against the "jerks" who re-hosted his programs (he didn't mind that part) and only provided an outdated version thereof (that's what he didn't like). He even made a page listing them and what I described in my previous sentence. Yet, a decade or so after he stopped working on his programs, as a matter of fact, it's the third-party archiving, especially by archive.org, which enables his work, and most of all the corresponding source code (which has been useful to me in recent years, as previously written), to live on...