Calculator gaming

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Calculator gaming is the phenomenon of programming and playing games on programmable calculators, especially graphing calculators. It is largely a pastime of high school and college students, who generally are required to use such powerful calculators in advanced mathematics classes; as a result, it is sometimes a clandestine activity when done in class.

A screenshot of the game Space Dementia for the TI-89. Space Dementia was programmed in C

1 History
2 Examples
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

In the 1990s, graphing calculators became powerful enough and cheap enough to be common among high school students for use in math class, even though they cost a hundred and fifty dollars for a very advanced device. Handheld game consoles have always been popular and suddenly graphing calculators doubled as game consoles.

Calculators such as HP-48 and TI-82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as RPL programming language or TI-BASIC directly on the calculator; programs could also be written in assembly language or (less often) C on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator. As calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased via Moore's Law, games increased in complexity.

By the 1990s, programmable calculators were able to were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as Lemmings and Doom. (Lemmings for HP-48 was released in 1993 [1]; Doom for HP-48 was created in 1995 [2].) Some games such as Dope Wars caused controversy when students played them in school.

The look and feel of said games, on a HP-48 class calculator, due to the lack of dedicated audio and video circuitry providing hardware acceleration, can at most be compared to the one offered by 8-bit handheld consoles such as the early Game Boy or the more recent Gameking (low resolution, monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to the built-in games of non-Java enabled cell phone [3].

As of 2006, since other mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs have become popular and powerful, calculator gaming is no longer as popular. However, programming calculators to play games remains a phenomenon in schools since they are required in math class, and are easily programmable without other tools, as opposed to cell phones or PDAs; but with a tradeoff with the omission of a user-friendly interface for text-editing akin to modern programming suites.