For your consideration... TIC-TAC-MAX... a tic-tac-toe game with miniMax AI.

[falcon56215]

Thanks for the suggestions moonbeam!

I have seen chess programs for the TI calculator series, and from what I have seen the HP Prime is much faster, so it should be possible, and if coded right it could probably play a decently strong game. I am used to coding in C#, so the syntax of the Prime programming language has been a challenge. I am continuously going back and correcting syntax errors.

A couple of things I think would make it difficult to write a chess engine on the Prime is the very weak debug mode. When you are used to step over and step out, it gets kind of tedious stepping through a loop that has 100 iterations just to get to the next part of the program. Also, and maybe I am missing this, there doesn't seem to be any support for custom variable types where you can define variables and then access them with friendly names like move.playerColor, etc.

The use of Notepad++ as a program editor is awesome, however... especially with the HP Prime language definitions I found on hpcalc.org. I modified the theme to match my dark visual studio theme:



I wish I would have gotten into things like this a long time ago. I remember watching WarGames and Professor Stephen Falken was my hero for a long time... as well as Matthew Broderick and that old IMSAI computer! I only had an Atari 400 at the time, and Atari Basic was my first language. I eventually progressed to Machine Language... and that was a bear! Maybe there was an easier way to do it, but I was coding stuff like load accumulator with such and such value then store it here... real basic level stuff and very difficult for a 13 year old kid with no internet access (and no world wide web!). I had to get books, and they usually had to be special ordered, as most bookstores carried no such programming books in the early 80s.

I have been learning quite a bit of C#, but I also worry that it and the .NET framework might not port well to other operating systems, such as linux... so I may be limiting myself by doing things the "Microsoft" way.... but I LOVE Visual Studio!!

Other than some of the above mentioned shortcomings, I have really enjoyed programming the Prime... it takes me back to my Atari Basic days!