Puzzle Description:

Block Dude (A TI Calculator Game)

#1: Arduinna (arduinna) on Feb 8, 2008 [SPOILER]

Wow-- calculators have games??

Oh yes. I never hacked my TI82 to run assembler, but there were some pretty slick games on the TIs. TI calculators are, processor-wise, roughly equivalent to the old Spectrum ZX80 machines from the early 80s.

Yes they have games and these are the same calculators the kids are sitting with at their desks. Fortunately kids are not entranced by games that can run on calculators. The novelty wears of quickly.

Not when you have a boring class. I have a game on my calculator and it got me through a few classes. In fact I still play it some times. Never had this game though.

I teach in a computer classroom, and for the first time, I actually told my students I didn't mind if they played solitaire or checked their email during class, as long as they were quiet. I figure most of them can pay attention perfectly well while playing solitaire (after all, 18 year olds today grew up with cell phones and I-pods), and if they don't pay attention, it's their own loss. I'm certainly not going to force them. Generally, I just try to be interesting enough that they pay me some attention, too!

It was small and I bit. Quick and fun Phil. Thanks! :)

I attended school during the abacus era. We played the original Rock Man on it. ;-)

LOL Gypso!

I was in high school when the earth-shattering Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator hit the market. I bought mine for $150. The "SR" stood for slide rule, because it could do everything a slide rule could do, only better. The school supplied us all with slide rules in those days, but the SR-10 could not only multiply, divide and do squares and square roots, it could add and subtract and keep track of the exponent too! A positive wonder, and all of the reasonably affluent geeks in my physics class ran out to get one. Within a few years, calculators had gotten so cheap and powerful, that slide rules disappeared from the face of the earth, but the first affordable calculator I ever saw was the fabulous SR-10.

Of course, we invented zillions of games to play on calculators, including things that would spell messages when you'd hold the display upside down, and calculator nim, and so forth. Also, the SR-10 had the odd feature that it didn't automatically clear itself when you turned it on. It would typically come up with some random number on the display, but something like one time in five hundred it would come up in a cool state, with numbers on the display counting rapidly upward, or some numbers counting while others were blinking and others were half illuminated. We set for hours turning the thing on and off, hoping to get a cool random start up state.

It was a few years before programmable calculators became available. I wrote several games for the SR-52, including a mastermind game. It was a bit limited, of course, since you could only store 224 program steps and only had a numeric display. Mine died and Texas Instruments was nice enough to replace it with a TI-59, but I never really got around to doing much programming on that one. By then I had computers to play with.

Rock Man was probably after my time.

Yes perhaps Jan.

Wow. Jan wrote way too much for me to read, with a bit too much information. I thought I was done reading when I graduated. :-)

Graduated what?

Kindergarten, what else?

That makes sense. :)

My college room mate had a TI that you could program games into and then play them. The problem was no storage so that it needed to be reprogrammed each time you wanted to play game.

My dad bought me a programmable calculator to use in math class explaining to me that I could program all of the formulas the teacher was giving us. He just shook his head when he saw me programming in games instead. I was never great at math but I did grow up to be a programmer.

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