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TI-89 Height-Mapped Raycaster

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Why This Matters

The TI-89 Height-Mapped Raycaster showcases how advanced graphics techniques like raycasting and procedural generation can be implemented on legacy hardware, pushing the boundaries of what graphing calculators can achieve. This development highlights potential for innovative gaming and visualization experiences on low-power devices, inspiring both hobbyists and industry developers to explore retro hardware capabilities.

Key Takeaways

TI-89 Height-Mapped Raycaster

A custom height-mapped raycasting engine and dungeon crawler game for the TI-89 graphing calculator, built on top of the 2002 FAT Engine. Renders textured walls, stair geometry, billboard enemy sprites, and procedurally generated dungeons on a 10MHz Motorola 68000 with a 160x100 4-shade grayscale LCD.

Full videos: dungeon crawler | stairs demo

What's here

Descend ( fatd_dungeon.c ) is a procedural dungeon crawler with:

Height-mapped raycaster with per-tile floor elevations and stair-step rendering

Textured walls and doors using the FAT Engine's texture system

Billboard enemy sprites with mask-based transparency and per-column Z-buffer occlusion

Procedural level generation (rooms, L-shaped corridors, triangle-wave staircases)

Bump-to-attack combat, HP/level tracking, blinking minimap

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