Calculator gaming

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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.

1 History
2 Examples
3 See also
4 External links
- 4.1 Game showcases
- 4.2 Other

[edit] History

A few games exist for even some of the earliest programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, one of the first full-fledged scientific calculators), including the long-popular Lunar Lander game often used as an early programming exercise. However, limited program address space and lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming a rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain. It wasn't until the early 1990s when graphing calculators became powerful enough and cheap enough to be common among high school students for use in math class; Handheld game consoles have always been popular and suddenly the newly powerful graphing calculators, with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer for backup, could double 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 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 an 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 or BREW enabled cell phone [3].

Within the past few years, games still continued to be programmed for graphing calculators, but with amazing complexity. A new wave of games has appeared for the TI-83+/Ti-84+ series due to an advanced library for TI-BASIC programmers called xLIB. Assembly remained the language of choice for calculators running on a Zilog Z80 processor, but for those running on a Motorola 68000 processor, with C (thanks to TIGCC) becoming increasingly powerful, assembly slowly began to become a bit less popular.

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.