[ µHz ]

Introduction

µHz (Microhertz) is a graphics demo for the TI-83 (+) series graphical calculator. It doesn't cheat and run at the SE's 15MHz, (hence the title), so will run just fine on the regular 83+/83.

It was written by Ben Ryves for MaxCoderz. In retrospect, Pixel Madness wasn't as mad as it made out to be, and the unfinished competition 'sequel' was ugly, slow, and... well, a bit rubbish. Hence this!

Installation

There are two binaries; one for TI-83 Ion, one for TI-83 Plus MirageOS. I'm assuming you know which calculator you own and shell you use! Just send the relevant *.8xp/*.83p file to your calculator using your file transfer program (TI-Connect, GraphLink, TILP, FastLink, ...), run your shell and open it from there.

Usage

Just let it run! You can skip through scenes with Clear if need be. As the frame rate is not blazingly high in some scenes, make sure to hold the key down for a bit before releasing it.

If the display is not clear enough, you can press + or - to adjust the contrast. Pressing Enter at any point stops the current scene from automatically advancing after a delay - only really of use if you feel you really need to keep on watching one particular scene!

Some of the scenes have 'hidden' keystrokes. Have a play with the cursor keys!

Thanks

Many thanks to Mike G for providing the BBC Micro font. The photos used for some of the graphics are from an old Corel stock CD. The TI-83 Plus developer guide was very useful (display driver reference), for a change.

Source Code

Unsurprisingly, this was written in Z80 assembly language. More surprisingly, it was written to be assembled in Brass, not TASM. Visit the Brass website to download the assembler. Even better, download Latenite (in development at the time of writing) and you'll be able to open the Latenite project file and build/run the source/binary with a single keystroke.

You can find the source code in the '/Source' subdirectory of this zip archive.