Running Doom on a Calculator! TI-83 Plus Games Tutorial

Just call me a cold calculated killer .

Oh , greetings and welcome to an L G R thing .

And yes , we're gonna be playing Doom on one of these .

One of these .

This is the Texas instruments T I 83 plus graphing calculator released way too long ago and still costs too freaking much unless you're like me and recently found one for $5 at a goodwill .

And , uh , that is still such a satisfying feeling .

Ha You know , I've talked to crap about Texas instruments before and sort of analyzed their business practices and why these things still cost so much and are enforced in so many schools .

Uh , but today I just want to talk about them in a rather happy sense because these , they're really cool as far as the hardware , if you can get one for cheap , you know , back in the day when I put software on here , we called it hacking .

It wasn't because we were stupid kids and hacking sounded cool because the matrix , this is actually a thing that Texas instruments want you to do .

Not just math they built in the functionality to install your own programs using a cable that they provide .

Let's just go ahead and take a look at this because I think this is super fascinating and doom .

So pretty much the only thing you're going to need other than the calculator and a computer .

It's one of these Texas instruments , graph link cables .

This is the USB edition , the one I had back in the day I think was serial .

But uh yeah , they make them in USB now and they work like the same and they're just obviously easier to uh get working on modern hardware .

So it has this little uh uh analog looking jack , I guess .

And you plug that right here into the bottom of the calculator and then uh just turn it on , plug this into your computer and go into the software , which is at this point called T I connect .

And that is the version for modern operating systems .

There's some older ones as well .

Like if you really want to do this on a Windows 95 computer , you could .

So , yeah , you just start it up .

It will detect your calculator .

Who knows ?

Just browse around .

If you've got to use calculator , you might have some stuff already preinstalled on there .

It could be interesting .

But anyway , all you gotta do is go over to a website like T I CALC .

There's links to all this stuff in the video description by the way .

But yeah , and just find a game that is compatible with your calculator .

And in this case , we're looking for the T I 83 plus .

Download what you want , extract it .

And you're gonna be looking for one of these , either eight X G files or eight X P files in the case of the 83 plus here .

And you can pretty much just drag them onto this window or with the eight X P files , you can right click them at least in windows and have it , send it directly over there .

Really just check the instructions for whatever you're downloading .

It's probably in a zip archive and it'll tell you how to do it .

Some things are gonna be different .

But yeah , for the most part , it's just drag and drop and that's pretty much it .

You know , the thing to really worry about is sometimes you're going to need a kind of loader program .

The two that are going to be the most popular are Ion and Mirage Os .

These are programs that you're gonna run before running .

Like the other programs that you want to run considering a lot of games require these .

Uh They're good to have both installed on your Texas instruments device .

It's also worth noting you probably want to upgrade your operating system .

I have version 1.19 on my T I 83 plus , which I think is the most recent version and it's free .

All this stuff is just still on the Texas instrument site .

They support this crap because , I mean , they freaking still sell them .

Ok .

Now that I've got some software on there , I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on , which just brings us to the normal cursor there , which , you know , let's just do calculator things and whatnot .

But who really cares what we really want to do here is check out what's installed and , you know , make sure everything's good .

So press the second button here and then M M right down there , which brings us to this menu .

And this will let us check what is actually in the storage here .

It's massive 160 k of flash ram and 27 K of ram .

You can see we have some Ram and the archive free there .

The archive is the flash Ram .

And um if we go and check here , you see those things with the little asterisks to the left of them , that means that those are archived , those are uh programs and apps and you know , whatever .

So if it's archived , that means we're not going to be able to open it directly .

And in fact , a lot of these aren't going to be opened directly anyway , because they're , you know , coded in one way or another .

So that's what those external programs that I installed on here was for such as Mirage Os and I just pressed the app's key to open that up .

And this right here gives us a nice little graphical interface that shows the things that it thinks that it can open .

Some of them , it can , some of them , it can't .

And for those that it can't , then that is actually going to be uh opened with uh by pressing the program here and that a at the very top .

Um that is ion , you see these other ions , you open this one first , once you transfer them over , it'll install this a and then that's when you open this and it'll just put in the program a command and this gives you another little menu .

It's just all text and these are the things that it can open from here .

So let me just go ahead and uh open Tetris first because , you know , it's , it's a very simple thing that you would probably expect maybe that this could do , but even still , I think it's um pretty , pretty fascinating .

You just use the arrows and I mean , it's , it's freaking Tetris and it works , man .

Obviously there's no sound on this because it's , it's a calculator , right ?

If it had sound , I imagine it would sound uh very calculating , perhaps mathematical .

All right .

So I did something wrong there .

Sometimes you'll get some weird errors like that , but , you know , just clear out of there and um hopefully we'll be OK .

Uh Let's open Jazz Ball .

You do have to be kind of careful with this because um just the memory of this system is , you know , I mean , it's insanely lacking the fact that it's pulling off this stuff at all is just kind of amazing to me .

Um , but yeah , this is a version of jazz ball and as you can see here it's kind of like the arcade game kicks .

And if you played , um , you know , any of the , like , good Microsoft entertainment backs for Windows three back in the day , yeah , you'll pretty much probably recognize this .

Just try to , well , that didn't take long at all .

You try to trap the balls .

Dang it .

Let's try Super Mario 1.2 here .

This , I've always found impressive .

This is another one that I had back in the day and holy crap .

I don't think it was maybe 1.2 , maybe it was an earlier one , but this is just darned impressive to me .

It's , um , again , also really tough because of , you know , I mean , it's just this little screen .

Ok , but it's a fully featured Mario game .

Holy crap .

It's just , it's not only really fast , like , impressively fast .

I don't know if they were just trying to show off or what because it makes it really hard to play .

But , uh , yeah , I mean , it's pretty awesome actually .

Yeah , time for the main event here and that is Z Doom .

There's actually another version of Doom on here , believe it or not .

There's two of them .

Uh , but this is the one that I find to be , uh , well , just the better one .

And it is actually based on this other one that a lot of people call it French Doom .

This is the other version of Doom I was talking about French Doom uh that it was based on like Doom 83 .

It was just made of the plain old T I 83 .

And uh honestly , while this is impressive in its own right , it actually shares more in common with Wolfenstein 3d .

I mean , you can see , I've got like , you know , the gun from Wolfenstein right there and it's pretty fast is the thing like it , it's a more than playable thing , but uh who died .

Yep , that's it .

It just kicked me out .

Uh So you can kind of see what that was .

It was just pretty much Wolfenstein 3d .

They called it Doom .

I don't know .

But this one on the other hand , so you can actually go over here into the options and check the uh difficulty , which is I'm gonna put it all the way down because this is a really tough game and we're gonna start a new game here of Z Doom .

Oh 0.12 level one .

And yeah , you can see here this , I think screams Doom even though it's still , uh you know , the same kind of , I mean , there's no like height difference in the levels .

It's just very Wolfenstein like , and as you'll see , it's a lot slower and that's probably due to uh like the animations here .

I mean , look how slow I'm shooting .

Holy nuts .

Yeah .

There you go .

Die at the same time .

I'm playing Doom on a calculator .

And that right there is just , uh , I mean , it doesn't matter how slow it runs to me considering how old this hardware is in here .

I mean , we're talking insanely limited Z AC P U kind of stuff .

Six megahertz , I believe the fact that this is even doing anything at all , remotely looking like Doom is just fantastic .

It's just , uh , almost unplayable .

You , this is all it is , by the way , you get some weapons later on if you can survive .

But I mean , it's just so slow that it's unbearable really .

Which is a shame .

Uh , so that's , that's doom .

That's all I gotta say .

Um , pretty much .

Uh , if you want to mess around with one of these calculators , then why don't you do that ?

I mean , pick one up , it's super limited .

But , I mean , there are a ton of games and as you saw it , I mean , it , it is pretty simple to get them on here .

Not a big deal whatsoever .

Oh , sweet .

Got to level two .

Nice .

But yeah , once you figure out these things quirks , um , it's awesome and I am dead .

Well , that's pretty much it for me messing around with some gaming on the Texas instruments .

T I 83 plus .

I mean , holy crap .

What a cool little thing .

And it was , like , never meant to be able to do stuff like that .

Um , that's just , that's what it is .

Bloody fantastic as far as I'm concerned .

And if you enjoyed this little , look at some weird stuff on a calculator , then perhaps you'd like to see some of my other videos on calculators and other nonsense .

I've got new videos every Monday and Friday here on L G R .

So check them out if you'd like .

And as always , thank you very much for watching .