Performance

This game runs by constantly looping, and with each loop, it does several things:

• Checks to see if you are pressing a key.
• Captures a picture of the screen, and loads the picture back onto the screen moved 10 pixels to the right.
• Runs a loop for every row, and generates new items for each row.
• Checks to see what item it right in front of your avatar.

As you can see, this is a lot to do for every loop. The game does not speed up, but while I have spun this as a plus (as it keeps the game low stress), it is actually due to the low performance of TI-BASIC on a TI-89 Titanium; the program actually can't run faster!

Concepts 💡

Assembly language programs run directly on the calculator's processor, the Motorola 68000. In the best cases, this processor can run up to 16 MHz (16 million operations a second), so assembly language programs are much faster. They also allow more control over the device, which enables cool tricks like grayscale graphics and power control.

Unfortunately, this also means they are far more dangerous than TI-BASIC programs; if something goes wrong, you will need to erase your calculator's entire RAM to make it usable again. Assembly language is far more advanced and difficult to program directly, and you can't program them natively on your calculator. To write them, you would most likely need to install an SDK and compiler that allows you to write in one language (like C), and compile it into assembly.