The State of the TI Community (1999)
The TI community is declining like the video game industry, with increasing negativity and entitlement towards new releases. The article urges for a supportive environment to appreciate programmers' efforts.
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The article discusses the decline of the TI community, drawing parallels with the video game industry. The author, Justin Karneges, reflects on the past when games were innovative and well-crafted, contrasting it with the current state where many new releases lack creativity and originality. He expresses disappointment over the negative reception of new games within the TI community, highlighting a shift from appreciation to criticism and entitlement among users. Karneges emphasizes the hard work that programmers invest in creating games and urges the community to foster a more positive environment. He notes that while there are still valuable contributions from programmers, the overall atmosphere has become hostile and ungrateful. The article calls for a return to a more supportive and appreciative community, suggesting that the TI community, like the video game industry, is at risk of losing its essence if these trends continue.
- The TI community is experiencing a decline similar to that of the video game industry.
- There is a growing trend of negativity and entitlement among users towards new game releases.
- Programmers' hard work is often unappreciated, leading to a lack of motivation to create.
- A call for a more positive and supportive community environment is emphasized.
- The article reflects on the importance of creativity and originality in both gaming and programming.
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6 commentsTwo reasons for that:
1. The NES was just after of the big video game crash of 1983†. The video game market had imploded, and only really good games would get made, as nothing else would sell at all. Games before this, like on the Atari 2600, were mostly all crap, if you average them all; it’s only in hindsight that we mostly remember the few good games.
2. Nintendo had an iron grip on the NES platform, partly as a response to said crash. They would only release good games. On other later (but still contemporary) popular open platforms, like the Commodore 64, quality varied wildly, and crap games were all over the place.
† <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_game_crash_...>
As for games, the average time span between releases of stuff I find playworthy has grown to over 5 years.
I am still grateful for TIGCC, a port of GCC that cross-compiles C to m68k and has a linker for the executable format of my TI-89 Titanium. It was published on ticalc.org in the previous millennium and still works on my Mac to this day.
Gotta give huge props to the ticalc.org staff for keeping the website up.
It is interesting that Justin regrets the NES. I do not remember reading that post at the time, but it would have sounded like grandpa yelling at clouds to me. The NES was something that happened when I was 4 or something; it was prehistoric.
In contrast, my successive TIs were much better than consoles to me (though I played Dreamcast and PC games as well). It was comparatively easy to dig quite deep into embedded programming and whilst I never really did any assembler on it, I used TIGCC quite a lot. And programs compiled with it; I still start Phoenix II on my TI 89-Ti every now and then.
The good thing is that we can now say that the TI community had some very good years ahead in 1999, possibly much better than the years before that this post laments. However, I am sad that the scene was mostly gone by 2005.
Anyway, it was a good ride.
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