Published by KermMartian 1 week ago on Nov. 2, 2025, 5:54 p.m. | Discuss this article

Welcome back to Projects of the Month! This September, our members worked on several interesting projects, so let's take a look:

• 3d Renderer for the TI84+: New to Cemetech, Znak_Pares made their very own wireframe 3D object rendering program for the monochrome TU-84 Plus/TI-84 Plus.
  
• An Honest Effort: Programming in C for the Ti 83/4/SE/+/CSE: theprogrammingcube has started a project which aims to make C programming viable for the TI-83/84/+ calculators, by utilizing the Z88DK toolchain. This has historically been difficult due to hardware (e.g. register) limitations of the z80 CPU that preceded the TI-84 Plus CE's ez80 CPU, so we're following this effort with interest. Be sure to check it out!
• AtomicOS Develoment Thread [TI-83/84 Plus/SE]: New Cemetech member spiCE_456 has been documenting their work on a new shell for the TI-83/84/+/SE, which aims to be a Windows-like interface for managing and launching different apps. They're writing the shell in the Axe Parser language, which generally reduces development time for skilled Axe developers versus z80 assembly. Thus far, they have demonstrated features such as a window renderer with resizable windows.
  
• BOOMTANK for the TI-84+: This month, BPierce released their new game for the TI-84+. Just like the original video game "Scorched Earth", the goal of BOOMTANK is to aim and fire at other enemies on the randomly generated terrain. Be sure to download and give it a try!
  
• CRAWLER | A TI-Basic Top Down Rouge-like: DragonScholar71 created a TI-BASIC top-down rogue-like game for the monochrome TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus calculators. It features randomly generated maps with 56 rooms each, three types of enemies, and an unusual combat system. It hasn't quite hit the archives yet, and the author discussed potential challenges to porting it to the color-screen calculators, so feel free to encourage DragonScholar71 to continue the project in the topic!
  
• [Verilog] FPGA as ti link cable: queueRAM re-awakened discussion on this 2020 by rv68k, building on the original poster's work with their Pmod FPGA interface board (later discussed in its own project topic). This one was borderline for inclusion, but gets an honorable mention for work from several years ago inspiring and forming a partial foundation for a new project.
  
• Github Skyline - Your Github Contribution Story in 3D: Frequent GitHub users may be familiar with the 2D heatmap generated by the platform, showing your commit frequency to (public, mostly) repositories over the past year. Battlesquid adds a new dimension: an in-browser 3D renderer that turns your contributions into a 3D bar graph, complete with a nifty plinth, that you can rotate and explore. We haven't seen anyone 3D-print their contributions yet, but we have some serious Cemetech karma waiting for the first person to do so.
  
• INTRUSION CE: AcHamYT (and Gemini) created this C-language puzzle-like, horror-ish game, in which you defend your house from an intruder with your various security systems, such as cameras. motion scanners, and door locks. If you successfully defend your house for five nights, you win.
  
• Leaf Editor: AchakTheFurry has shown a demo of a beautiful on-calculator text editor for the TI-84 Plus CE. It supports formatting text with colors, inserting symbols, tokens, and the time and date, and even themes. As of the last update, the author was working on in-program linking support to transfer your documents to another calculator running Leaf Editor. If you're intrigued, share your comments in the topic!
  
• Pmod breakout board for TI graph link and voltage translation: queueRAM posted a topic all about the FPGA-interfacing Pmod breakout board he created for calculators. With a Pmod interface at one end, a 2.5mm stereo TRS socket at the other, and some handy breakout pins in between, it lets you easily prototype and test FPGA bitfiles to interface with any graphing calculator that supports the 2.5mm jack. It even includes the passive components necessary to support both 3.3V and 5V FPGA interfaces without damaging your calculator. If you like to experiment with FPGAs and calculators, this is the project for you!
  
• Shards of Grandeur PC RPG: 123outerme released the latest version of their indie turn-based RPG, Shards of Grandeur. Version v0.4.1 adds more features and bugfixes to this Godot-based game for PC and Android, which you can find on GitHub. We love seeing calculator programmers create exciting games for other platforms, and this is a perfect example.
• SnClair, a ZX Spectrum Emulator for CE: NoahK is known for nifty software and hardware projects like the TI-84 Plus KE (Keyboard Edition), and this project remains true to form. NoahK is still designing this ZX Spectrum emulator for the TI-84 Plus CE, and community discussion has already yielded a punny project name: SnClair can also be interpreted as "Tin"clair (that is, TI-Sinclair), based on the chemical symbol for tin. It's an ambitious but potentially impressive project, so be sure to add your encouragement in the topic!
• Thread Wires Calculator for 68k: Three-wire measurement is a simple way to determine the thread pitch of a bolt or screen with three wires of known diameter and a standard micrometer, without any further tools. CVSoft has built a 68k BASIC program that perform the necessary computations for you. The audience for this might be slightly niche, but if you're a machinist or work with hardware a lot, it might be just what you're seeking!
  
• TICEVID - A USB Video Player: ThePinkHacker is building a C-language video player for the TI-84 Plus CE, capable of streaming the video from a flash drive. Compression to improve the framerate, subtitles, and other metadata are in ThePinkHacker's future plans, so be sure to check it out and share your ideas and comments in the topic.
  
• Train Simulator Controller: KermMartian posted more updates from his years-long effort to build a physical train simulator in his house, modeled on the UK Class 80x passenger train. Many recent updates have been about the CAN bus controller and instruments in the design, but this time, Kerm has showed a laser-cut hardboard prototype of the central panel of the interface. We expect that the next update will show this assembled and populated with controls and instruments. If you're interested in putting a train cab in your own house, this is the project to follow.
  
• Working Ti-84 Plus CE Text Converter: Zytue67 has used the Scratch programming language to build a program to convert text files into .8xp files you can use on your calculator. It requires quite a few steps at the moment versus other methods like the TI Connect CE program editor, TokenIDE, or SourceCoder 3, but it's a promising project that also has excellent learning opportunities for becoming more familiar with TI program formats.
• Znak's BASIC Tetris for TI83+/TI84+: Znak_Pares managed to bookend this project list, building a TI-BASIC Tetris game with the basics you would expect: seven Tetromino types, rotation, and line-clearing. Tetromino previews, holding Tetrominos, and losing (!) are still to come.
  

We have quite a full list of projects, including completed projects, so don't forget to explore the creative entries this month, and vote for the best completed project! In addition, this article was a joint effort between Michael2_3B and myself: major kudos to Michael2_3B for his hard work during a busy month to keep this article moving.

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