Calculator gaming is the phenomenon of programming and playing games on programmable calculator

Programmable calculator

Programmable calculators are calculators that can automatically carry out a sequence of operations under control of a stored program, much like a computer. The first programmable calculators such as the IBM CPC used punched cards or other media for program storage...

s, especially graphing calculator

Graphing calculator

A graphing calculator typically refers to a class of handheld calculators that are capable of plotting graphs, solving simultaneous equations, and performing numerous other tasks with variables...

s. It is largely a pastime of high school and college students, who generally are required to use such powerful calculators in advanced mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 classes; as a result, it is sometimes a clandestine activity done during class.

History

A few games exist for even some of the earliest programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A

Hewlett-Packard 9100A

The Hewlett-Packard 9100A is an early computer , first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM...

, 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 calculator

Graphing calculator

A graphing calculator typically refers to a class of handheld calculators that are capable of plotting graphs, solving simultaneous equations, and performing numerous other tasks with variables...

s became powerful enough and cheap enough to be common among high school

High school

High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

 students for use in mathematics class; Handheld game console

Handheld game console

A handheld game console is a lightweight, portable electronic device with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are run on machines of small size allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place...

s 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

TI-82

The TI-82 is a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments. The TI-82 was designed in 1993 as a stripped down, more user friendly version of the TI-85, and as a replacement for the TI-81. It was the direct predecessor of the TI-83. It shares with the TI-85 a 6 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor...

 could be programmed in proprietary programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s such as RPL programming language

RPL programming language

The RPL programming language is a handheld calculator system and application programming language used on Hewlett-Packard's engineering graphing RPN calculators of the HP-28, HP-48, HP-49 and HP-50 series, but it is also usable on non-RPN calculators, such as the HP-39...

 or TI-BASIC directly on the calculator; programs could also be written in assembly language

Assembly language

An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

 or (less often) C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator. As calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased, games increased in complexity.

By the 1990s, programmable calculators were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as Lemmings

Lemmings (video game)

Lemmings is a puzzle computer game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in . Originally developed for PC and Commodore Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular computer games of its time, and several gaming magazines gave it some of their highest review scores at the time...

and Doom (Lemmings for HP-48 was released in 1993; Doom for HP-48 was created in 1995). 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

Game Boy line

The line is a line of battery-powered handheld game console sold by Nintendo. It is one of the world's best-selling game system lines with a combined 200+ million units sold worldwide....

 or the more recent Gameking

GameKing

GameKing is a brand of handheld game consoles, designed and developed by TimeTop in 2003, for the Hong Kong consumer market. The brand has three consoles, the GameKing I, the GameKing II and the GameKing III...

 (low resolution, monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to the built-in games of non-Java

Java Virtual Machine

A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...

 or BREW enabled cell phones.

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 after the release of the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus series, TI's first graphing calculators to natively support assembly. TI-BASIC programming also rose in popularity after the release of third-party libraries. Assembly remained the language of choice for these calculators, which run on a Zilog Z80

Zilog Z80

The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...

 processor, although some assembly implements, have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language. For those running on a Motorola 68000

Motorola 68000

The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...

 processor (like the TI-89), C programming (possible using TIGCC

TIGCC

TIGCC is a software development environment which allows developers to program and compile A68K assembly, GNU assembly, and C code for the Motorola 68000 series Texas Instruments graphing calculators...

) has begun to displace assembly.

, since other mobile device

Handheld device

A mobile device is a small, hand-held computing device, typically having a display screen with touch input and/or a miniature keyboard and less than . Early pocket sized ones were joined in the late 2000s by larger but otherwise similar tablet computers...

s such as mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s and PDA

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

s have become popular and powerful, and because some newer calculators do not have the same programming capabilities as earlier ones, calculator gaming is no longer as popular. However, programming calculators to play games remains a phenomenon in schools since they are required in mathematics class, and are easily programmable without other tools, as opposed to cell phones or PDAs; but with a trade-off with the omission of a user-friendly interface for text-editing akin to modern programming suites.

Examples

• Block Dude
• Deal or No Deal
  Deal or No Deal (US game show)
  Deal or No Deal is the American version of the international game show of Dutch origin of the same name. The show was hosted by Howie Mandel, and premiered on December 19, 2005, on National Broadcasting Company . The hour-long show typically aired at least twice a week during its run, and included...
  
  
• Doom
• Dope Wars
• Drugwars
  Drugwars
  Drugwars is a turn-based strategy computer game in which the player assumes the role of a drug dealer. The object of the game is to deal the most drugs to pay off the "loan shark" by the end of the game and make a profit. Drugwars was originally an MS-DOS program created by John E...
  
  
• GB68K, a Game Boy
  Game Boy
  The , is an 8-bit handheld video game device developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on , in North America in , and in Europe on...
  
   emulator for TI-89, TI-92, and V200 series calculators
• The Legend of Zelda
  The Legend of Zelda
  The Legend of Zelda, originally released as in Japan, is a video game developed and published by Nintendo, and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Set in the fantasy land of Hyrule, the plot centers on a boy named Link, the playable protagonist, who aims to collect the eight fragments...
  
  
• Madden Calc
• Phoenix
• Super Mario Bros.
  Super Mario Bros.
  is a 1985 platform video game developed by Nintendo, published for the Nintendo Entertainment System as a sequel to the 1983 game Mario Bros. In Super Mario Bros., the player controls Mario as he travels through the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Toadstool from the antagonist...
  
  
• Tetris
  Tetris
  Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
  
  

See also

• Programmable calculator
  Programmable calculator
  Programmable calculators are calculators that can automatically carry out a sequence of operations under control of a stored program, much like a computer. The first programmable calculators such as the IBM CPC used punched cards or other media for program storage...
  
  
  • Graphing calculator
    Graphing calculator
    A graphing calculator typically refers to a class of handheld calculators that are capable of plotting graphs, solving simultaneous equations, and performing numerous other tasks with variables...
    
    

• Mobile game
  Mobile game
  A mobile game is a video game played on a mobile phone, smartphone, PDA, tablet computer or portable media player. This does not include games played on handheld video game systems such as Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable....
  
  
• Handheld game console
  Handheld game console
  A handheld game console is a lightweight, portable electronic device with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are run on machines of small size allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place...
  
  
• Handheld electronic game
  Handheld electronic game
  ----Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they...
  
  

External links

• ticalc.org – A comprehensive archive of TI graphing calculator programs
• comp.sys.hp48 FAQ : 4 of 4 - Best Programs and Where to Get Them
• Wikibook on HP calculator programming