Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

[Aeni]

Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 50KB—on a graphing calculator | Ars Technica

This guy is a programming genius.

[Malacite]

Re: Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

O.O; dude!

[DakAttack]

Re: Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

Not.

[Aeni]

Re: Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

Not.

It's still an accomplishment. I'm wondering if programmers were given more leeway and more lead time if they could technically compress and make efficient game engines and squeeze assets to the point where it then becomes more palatable for players the world over to download online rather than buy it on CDs/DVDs. Kill 2 birds with one stone - reduce plastic consumption, lower bandwidth usage.

[Armando]

Re: Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

It's still an accomplishment.

An achievement, if you will.

For a second I thought this was written in assembly; Axe wasn't around when I fooled around with my TI-83. I mean, this is pretty insane no matter how you slice it but implementing this without the aid of a programming language would've been doubly insane. Maybe that's why we never got something like this for, say, the Game Boy.

I'm wondering if programmers were given more leeway and more lead time if they could technically compress and make efficient game engines and squeeze assets to the point where it then becomes more palatable for players the world over to download online rather than buy it on CDs/DVDs. Kill 2 birds with one stone - reduce plastic consumption, lower bandwidth usage.

Don't the art and music assets eclipse the size of the code by orders of magnitude? There's only so much compression you can apply to sound and textures before it just looks or sounds bad.

[Aeni]

Re: Portal on a Ti-83/84 Graphing Calculator

Don't the art and music assets eclipse the size of the code by orders of magnitude? There's only so much compression you can apply to sound and textures before it just looks or sounds bad.

That's what I thought at first until I remembered a while ago (okay, a long while ago), there was a development house out of Berlin, Germany, in the late 90s, that showed off this new compression technology that worked in tandem with Direct X (I believe at the time it was DX 6) It was mindblowing .... weighing in at only 23KB (Yes, Kilobytes), it featured a tech "demo" roughly 9 minutes long, with 3D that can scale with most DX 6 enabled graphics card (but with a biased bent towards Matrox cards) and sound quality that approached typical CD quality. Utilizing already existing libraries in your Windows (98 at the time) installation.

I know, things aren't the same anymore, and it seems that file size is the least of concerns as the price per GB of storage (nevermind KB or MB) have fallen to just mere pennies for your typical 7200 RPM SATA drive. However, with the exception of Google fiber, the cost of bandwidth has not decreased as appreciably and I don't even see a positive trend in the future with ISPs contemplating monthly caps.