Aliases
JamesV
James_V
Jimbob
ua.moc.evil|28vsemaj#ua.moc.evil|28vsemaj
Site URL
http://www.jvti.org
http://jamesv.calc.org
Ticalc.org URL
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/authors/57/5713.html
Location
Australia
Years Active
1998 to present
Affiliations
James Vernon is from Australia, programming in Z80 assembly for the TI-83/83+/84+, TI-84+CSE and TI-86 calculators.
Significance
James is most known for his series of Alien Breed games on the TI calculators, including Alien Breed II (83/83+), Alien Breed: Tower Assault (83/83+), Alien Breed IV: Final Assault (83/83+/86) and Alien Breed 5, which were all based on the original series by Team 17 for PC / Amiga. Alien Breed: Tower Assault was one of the earlier games that featured smooth-scrolling on both the vertical & horizontal plane at the same time, and all subsequent versions continued to be smooth-scrolling.
Other notable releases include: Invaded (83/83+), an R-Type style side-scrolling shoot-em-up; Banchor (86), a Zelda-type RPG; Centipede (83/83+/86), a remake of the Atari 2600 game; and a port of Spaze Invaders (originally by Hannes Edfeldt) for the TI-84+CSE.
Before learning assembly, James released some games on Calc.org & Ti-Files programmed in the TI-Basic language. His site was one of the sites that got hosting through Dimension-TI (Calc.org).
Contributions
- Alien Breed series (83/83+/86)
- Invaded (83/83+)
- Banchor (86)
- Spaze Invaders port (84+CSE)
- Centipede (83/83+/86)
- Hangman (83/83+/86)
- Thunderbirds (83/83+)
Site URLs
- http://www.jvti.org
- http://jamesv.calc.org
History
Mostly active between 1998 - 2002, James has occasionally returned to the TI community every 1-2 years with a new game or update to an old game.
James was a member of the TI-Calculator Programming Alliance (TCPA) from 2000 onwards.
(Taken from jvti.org About Me page)
My name is James Vernon and I was born in 1982 in Melbourne, Australia, where I still live. After graduating from high school, I studied Computer Science. My hobbies include drumming, skydiving, playing piano & guitar and martial arts.
Over the years, I’ve played around with the following programming languages: TI-Basic, Z80 Assembly, Pascal, HTML, C, C++, C#, Java, x86 Assembly, Visual Basic, JavaScript, ASP (classic) & PHP.
My first experience in any programming was in January 1998, when I bought a TI-83 for my maths studies. My first program was a "guess a number" game in TI-Basic. I continued to mess around with TI-Basic over the next few months, and ended up releasing my first attempt at Alien Breed, which used ASCII characters for graphics and ran ridiculously slow. Soon after that, I came across Spaze Invaders by Hannes Edfeldt (Movax). This led to me discovering the online community and Z80 Assembly.
As a newbie to the scene, I was directed to ASM Guru by James Matthews, which taught me a lot of the basics. I also spent a lot of time going over & over again through the Sqrxz source code (by Jimmy Mardell), which taught me a lot. I was lucky to be able to get help from some very knowledgeable programmers such as Jimmy Mardell, Pat Milheron (actually a TI programmer), Patrick Davidson, and after joining the TCPA in 2000, Dan Englender, who was a great help with my first ventures into the TI-83+, which was still relatively new at the time.
In 2000 I also started doing some programming for the TI-86, using The Guide as my main reference. My main interest in the TI-86 was to release a completed grayscale Zelda-type RPG game. Ironically, by the time I ended up completing what eventually became Banchor in 2006, the TI-86 calculator scene was all but dead.
Around 2002 after finishing my studies and (eventually) joining the work force, my TI game programming slowly fizzled out. Between 2002-2012, I occasionally had nostalgic moments and tried to either finish off projects I started years ago, update an existing game, or if I was feeling adventurous, even start new projects. Since early 2012, I've spent more time involved in the TI scene again, releasing Alien Breed 5, Spaze Invaders, and working on other projects.
If you have any questions about any of my TI-calculator programs, you can email me or find me on Facebook.
Miscellaneous
Although the first Alien Breed game in the series appeared to be Alien Breed II, this was because prior to learning Z80 assembly, James originally programmed a version in BASIC for the TI-83.