Not that anyone hadn't thought of it before, but I believe that I may hold the first claim of a grayscale TI calculator demo. I released a four-frame, 4-bit grayscale animation of beavis & butthead headbanging for the newly minted Zshell on TI-85 in 1992. I posted it to one of the listserves or usenet groups, but I have never been able to find a copy in anyone's archives. I'd love to see it again. It was not a fancy program. The frames were stored as 4 x 4 x 64x128 bitmaps = 16KB so it consumed like 2/3 of the calculator's memory. Fun times.

If anyone is a usenet archive ninja, my program was called 'BBANIM' and there was a TI-basic POC and zshell asm version released.

I recall that the first game using PoV grayscale was "Plain Jump" (sic) shortly afterwards which apparently continues to be a popular project to clone.

Haha, I made that, thanks for dredging this up! I really enjoyed optimizing that z80 assembly code to make it sufficiently fast for that tiny processor. Back then we had no smartphones in class so the ti83 was quite popular for playing games etc, and hand written assembly code was the only way to make it fast. Great learning experience.

I knew immediately that the link was to Desolate before opening it :) It blew me away the first time I played it, as I was used to my shitty turn-based TI-BASIC games.

Cool to see that one of the authors of the most cited paper in machine learning also got their start hacking on TI calculators. What a great learning environment that was!

Holy crap! This takes me back. I used this (or something based on it) on my TI84 SE+ to play around with grayscale over a decade ago. It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article. I never got into ASM on the TI calcs but I wrote a TON of TI-Basic. I spent a ton of time on those forums and posted a number of apps/games I wrote (though I can't find them now).