For the last little while, I've been toying with this idea. And now that Celtic2 has some sprite displaying support, it's coming closer to a reality!
The idea for this project is to have a general database of presidents' pictures, names, dates, important facts, etc to have in a portable manner for students in history class!
Don't believe me? Well, here's what I've gotten done, after Kerm pointed out SC's abilities which was extremely helpful.
Now, this is going to be as non-biased as I can make things, I'd like to stick to factual events that have been documented.
Right now, I'm using wiki for the pictures, found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
I'd love feedback for this project. Anything you'd like to contribute to facts on each president would be wonderful. Anyone that is a history buff and would like to contribute information for each president would be very helpful.
I'm currently working on each of the pictures, and hope to have them all completed later today.
I think this is a great idea for an educational (and fun!) program, and definitely thinking outside of the traditional box as far as calculator programs go. I look forward to continuing to be as helpful as I can be with SourceCoder and Celtic 2 to support this project.
I greatly appreciate SC's ability to do the picture converting, that's a god send.
Trying to add data via Tokens broke tokens, I'm guessing it has a limit on how large a file can get for its math? I don't know. :<
Guess for now, I'll just dump them all into notepad, and once Tokens can handle larger files, or SC can handle .8xvs (since I don't know how to edit .8xps properly to make it an appvar) then I'll update the sprites.
38 more sprites to create
I'd be happy to teach you how to turn .8xps into .8xvs; it's incredibly easy:
1) Download a hex editor like XVI32
2) Open the .8xp in question
3) Find the type byte at offset 0x3B. It should be 05 or 06. You will see the name of the program directly after it.
4) Change the 05 or 06 to hex 15 (that is, AppVarObj)
5) Save and close. Rename the file to .8xv, if you want.
Edit: Missing steps:
4b) Go to the end of the file. Look at the last two bytes, which should have a value like AB CD.
4c) Flip the byte order to get CDAB. Use your head or Windows Calculator to add ($15-$05) = $10 (16 decimal) to that value.
4d) If it's larger than $FFFF, trim off the first digit
4e) Change the last two bytes to what you calculated, except that you'll have to flip the order again.
Edit: These are looking superb, tifreak8x!
Thanks! I have 5 more in notepad, I just wanted to get more of them tested before I added more to the program. I still need to figure out what all kind of facts and information I should grab for each president to display.
This is a cool idea tifreak8x!
Also, I wrote a small utility to convert .8xp files to .8xv's recently; you can find it
here on ticalc.org
JamesV: Thanks! I thought it would be, and might prove to be handy for students pending they ever need it.
And thanks for the utility. Tokens does it, but something is wrong with it being able to go beyond a certain point in its math, I think, so I just need to wait for Merth to fix it, pending he ever finds the motivation to do so.
Also!
ALL 44 PRESIDENTS ARE NOW POSTED.
My eyes are on fire, now. I think I'm going to bed.
What do you all think? Any favorites?
black and white on a color calculator? seems legit.
2 Reasons:
1) There were a lot of them that only had black and white images.
2) The color palette accessible via BASIC is unable to handle the colors overly well. Trying to do so got me:
ok then. Maybe once Kerm improves SC3, then you could have better color pictures. I will definetely download this when it is finished.
ordelore wrote:
ok then. Maybe once Kerm improves SC3, then you could have better color pictures. I will definetely download this when it is finished.
The fault does not lie with SourceCoder. The fault lies with the fact that we have only 15 colors to work with in pure TI-BASIC on the TI-84+CSE. Take a look at http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8817 to see samples from adding TI-84+CSE picture (not Image) support to SourceCoder 3; here's what a full palette looks like:
=>
KermMartian wrote:
ordelore wrote:
ok then. Maybe once Kerm improves SC3, then you could have better color pictures. I will definetely download this when it is finished.
The fault does not lie with SourceCoder. The fault lies with the fact that we have only 15 colors to work with in pure TI-BASIC on the TI-84+CSE. Take a look at http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8817 to see samples from adding TI-84+CSE picture (not Image) support to SourceCoder 3; here's what a full palette looks like:
=>
Thanks for explaining, apparently Quote:
The color palette accessible via BASIC is unable to handle the colors overly well.
didn't answer that overly well.
I need to decide how I want to continue this. I think I'll have a separate appvar to handle the names, this will make that easier to access and use, plus update at a later time.
I could display the name at the very top, and store a list of facts below, and just clear out that spot for each page of facts. Still poking at ideas.
I would get the biographical info from Wikipedia. As long as you check the edit history (to make sure you're not in the middle of an edit war), you'll get information that's accurate, unbiased, and easy to source.
Alternatively, Encyclopedia Britannica is reliable and trusted in academia.
That was my thoughts as well. I just need to determine what is important information based on each president, since no two presidencies were the same. Differences in growing up, occupations to the point of presidency, what happened during/after, etc.
Will be a fun, and educational, project.
I've gotten all the names dropped into an appvar, and have begun on an official UI for this project.
I've also decided to add a 'flash card' mode, where a picture of a president is posted up, and you get to select from 3 or 4 choices. I'll probably make it time limit based on a hardness level? Easy, Normal and Hard, and you get less time the harder the level. Something to still think about.
tifreak8x wrote:
I've gotten all the names dropped into an appvar, and have begun on an official UI for this project.
I've also decided to add a 'flash card' mode, where a picture of a president is posted up, and you get to select from 3 or 4 choices. I'll probably make it time limit based on a hardness level? Easy, Normal and Hard, and you get less time the harder the level. Something to still think about.
I definitely think a memory/flash card game would be a valuable addition, and hopefully pretty easy to add once you have all that data in your Appvars anyway. What are you using for your UI? I wish there was a CSE DCS GUI available I could try to coerce you into using.
I bet you could do some dithering to get the pictures to look a little better, but this is looking pretty good already. Good work!
Yeah, I probably could, but, I'm not getting paid for it, so it looks good enough. You can see enough details of the faces and such to see who it is
@Kerm:
I'm just using the graph screen and creating my own menus and such, like I typically do
After a bit of work today, and correcting my own problems I created in my code, I now have a flash card like game built for my President Database.
Sadly, I can't do an animated screenshot, but I will try to capture a few stills to show off.
Next up will be throwing some data into some appvars and creating a text displayer to throw them on the screen properly, and start building the database portion of this project.
tifreak8x wrote:
2 Reasons:
1) There were a lot of them that only had black and white images.
2) The color palette accessible via BASIC is unable to handle the colors overly well. Trying to do so got me:
You could possibly use yellow instead of light gray, orange instead of medium gray, red instead of gray and brown instead of dark gray, but then maybe it will look too bright.
You could always add some dithering with gray tones, but I'm unsure how it would look like.
Oh well... that calc REALLY REALLY has an old school feel to it, lol. IMHO the limitations makes it more entertaining.