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ChipMusic.org / Forums / Other Vintage Computers & Consoles / [TI 82/83/83+/84+] Houston... we have a tracker
Yo, dooooodz.
All 1-bit / BEEPER musicians are hereby invited here:
http://1bit.i-demo.pl/
to share experience, music and whatevah more.
Doesn't matter if You prefer Texas Instrument, ZX Spectrum (Beepola or 1Tracker), old PC hardware, or ATARI.
1-bit rulez. 
just picked up a TI-83 plus and installed the tracker - hopefully I can help beta test this a bit 
Thanks, Joey. Your vine got me interested.
Are there any demo tracks I can listen to somewhere? I'd like to hear what the TI8x line is capable of.
Yo nonfinite, check my soundcloud. In addition to HoustonTracker and the small bunch of other native sound drivers, most of what goes on ZX Spectrum beeper also goes on TI, .
Ok here's some calculator porn for you all. https://www.flickr.com/photos/62235217@N07/13345821463/ as you can see I have some options in regards to choice of calculator. Also I have texas serial port cable, and I've got all components to make a parallel port cable. So which route do you reckon I should take?
Nice. Could you check if you can get HT (the TI-83 version) to work on the 82STATS?
As for the cable... I've never used a serial one, but I assume both options will work just fine. Using an USB cable myself since quite a while, it seems more reliable than everything else.
If I get around to actually doing this, then yes I can check Well, the USB is ofc. first choice with the 84 and 89, but the others don't support USB..
Contrary to what TI says, the SilverLink works fine on just about any model with a link port. I've successfully tested it on 82, 83, 85, and 86. Just use TiLP instead of TIconnect. (Make sure you completely uninstall TIconnect including the drivers before you install TiLP).
do you think there's ever a chance of this getting ported to TI-85? how much work would be required to do that?
someone gave me a ti-85, would be really cool to try this out!
TI-85 port? Absolutely! I have that model myself, so I definately want to use it
That being said, it won't happen anytime soon. The reasons being a) 85 and 86 use a different approach to displaying stuff, so I'll need to rewrite major parts of the print routines; and b) I'm more and more realizing that some design choices with HT were quite questionable (naturally, as it's the first tracker I've ever written), so I'm actually thinking about rewriting the whole thing. HT2, if you will. So, please be patient.
Another thing I do plan however is to port the ti1bit package to 85 and 86, so you can use ZX Spectrum 1-bit routines on these machines. That's a smaller project which will probably happen in the next months.
Contrary to what TI says, the SilverLink works fine on just about any model with a link port. I've successfully tested it on 82, 83, 85, and 86. Just use TiLP instead of TIconnect. (Make sure you completely uninstall TIconnect including the drivers before you install TiLP).
Ah but I didn't mean the SilverLink cable. I don't have that one. I just meant Normal USB to smaller USB cable. So what is the normal USB ports on the 84 and 89'er for?
Does anyone have a TI Graph Link USB cable they'd sell or trade me?
Last edited by Glitch Militia (Mar 24, 2014 8:09 pm)
Hey Irrlicht Project,
I've tested Houston Tracker on my TI-84+, worked fine until my Backup Battery died. Need to get a new one soon.
I used a usual Mini-USB Cable to send your tracker to the calculator. Worked fine for me, as well.
Greets Tronimal (/Low Bit Revolte)
Last edited by Tronimal (Mar 25, 2014 10:53 am)
Thanks! Yes, HT is confirmed to run on just about any newer model except the 82STATS, 82Parcus, 76.fr and 84CSE. 82STATS should work as it's essentially an 83. The 82Parcus build is still broken. 76.fr may or may not work, but since the model is quite rare, I don't think it's worth the effort in any case. As for the 84CSE, I have no plans to support it.
Oh god, help
I wrote a pretty complex piece, and literally moments after I finished it, I tried to quit the tracker (literally thinking "it's probably safest if I turn the calculator off) and it crashed, the calculator rebooted and cleared RAM.
houston tracker disappeared, but DoorsCS7 is still installed, and it claims that it saved my "folders and preferences" - so, am I totally fucked, or is the song data stored in preferences, and maybe if I'm lucky, reinstalling the tracker will give me my piece back? I figured I'd ask before trying so I don't fuck it up worse...
Sorry man, chances are pretty low that you'll get your song back. HT stores all data inside the binary, as that is the only safe way to store stuff on TI calcs w/o flash memory.
That being said, I'm curious about the error now, because obviously this shouldn't happen. Unfortunately I can't test on 83+/84+ cause I still don't have any of these models. I assume you're using a 84+? Are you using the latest version (0.3)? And, perhaps a stupid question, but how did you manage to turn off the calculator? Normally HT prevents you from shutting down the calc while it's running, and it should ignore the [2nd]+[ON] key combo. Perhaps this is a feature provided by DoorsCS? Could you try if the same thing happens under MirageOS?
Thanks for getting back! I'm on 83+, v 0.3
I didn't turn off the calculator, but I was trying to quit the tracker with the intent to turn off the calculator, and it the calc rebooted on its own, and cleared RAM. 