Click here to download NihonGO! Japanese Kana Learning Program (11 kilobytes zipped). Instructions:
1. Download nihongo.zip.
2. Unzip the files.
3. Download all three 8XP files (prgmHIRAGANA, prgmKATAKANA, prgmNIHONGO) to your calculator.
4. Run program NIHONGO.
This program is designed for beginner-level students of Japanese (maybe Japanese 101 or 102) who are still learning kana (hiragana, katakana). I meticulously inputted all the kana myself, including the archaic wi and we kana! That was 96 kana in total, not to mention things like punctuation marks. The program included, NihonGO! is a quiz program that allows students to repetitively quiz themselves on the kana. There are also kana tables the students can reference. I can see this becoming very popular with students of Japanese in high schools, universities, and community colleges because they often have TI-83 Plus-compatible calculators.
This program was in development hell for literally years. I originally started it in 2001 in Hong Kong, eventually gave up on programming it because I was overambitious and wanted to put too many features into the program, and then I quit for many years, and presumed the file lost, but then I rediscovered it on an old web drive that I had set up, and thought "you know, since I'm studying Japanese again, it would be great to resurrect this project." So I cut out a few features and finished it in less than 24 hours. Here it is, I hope you enjoy it!
Click here to download I Wanna Be an HP (1 kilobyte, zipped). Instructions:
1. Download it.
Unzip it.
3. Send WANNABHP to your calculator.
4. Run prgmWANNABHP. The rest is explained with on-screen directions.
Wow, I should be ashamed of myself, I'm still programming in TI-BASIC at the age of 20!
There was a competition on www.calcg.org to see who could program the best RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) program. My program is called "I Wanna Be an HP" because Hewlett-Packard calculators use RPN usually, not algebraic notation. For those who are unaware, RPN is an alternative to algebraic notation, using postfix notation instead of putting the signs between the numbers. It also uses a stack, and doesn't use parentheses like algebraic notation.
We had only 48 hours to do the competition (from topic announcement to deadline). I'm not sure how my program did, yet. I have heard that the programs of others are as small as 350 bytes, and this is over 2,000, but mine is nice and graphical, as you can see.
I normally like to program games, but when there's an incentive like fame in a competition, I'll program other things too, like a nifty graphical RPN calculator. As you can see from the bottom screen shot, the program is calculating a math problem:
9 3 5 3 + 3 5 - 2 * / + -
= 9 3 8 -2 2 * / + -
= 9 3 8 -4 / + -
= 9 3 -2 + -
= 9 1 -
= 8
Another noteworthy thing about this program is that I wrote all the code under Windows 3.1, because Korean Windows XP wouldn't cooperate with the TI Graph Link software. I have never tested this program on a real calculator, either. I wrote it entirely with emulators.
