Z-Kart 3D - The coolest "3d" racing game under 1K!
Current version: 1.1 for the TI-83

Ion (or a fully compatible shell) is required to run this game.

Note: screenshots are from the TI-85/TI-86 version.

Welcome to the home page of Z-Kart 3D for the TI-83! Z-Kart 3D is an incredibly small yet action-packed "3-D" racing game. Ion (or a fully compatible shell) is required to run this game. The engine behind Z-Kart 3D was originally meant as a joke, but after trying it I thought it worked well enough to be released. A good number of people who played it actually thought it was good (though I also received at least 4 E-Mails flaming it). You can get this wonderful (?) program right here: TI-83 - it takes only 839 bytes of memory.

In addition to the game itself, the archive also includes documentation and complete source code.

New features in version 9.0:

The story behind Z-Kart 3D:

The sinister truth told here for the first time

The evil seed for this game was planted in my mind sometime around November 1996. During Mr. Joy's Precalculus class another student (I can't remember who it was, unfortunately) showed me a TI-85 game called "Mario Kart". This was a simple text-based 2-D game in BASIC, but it was actually fairly good (for a BASIC game, anyway). I soon managed to find several different versions with several different authors (though it was a bit strange that so many different people wrote almost identical code). After seeing this, I decided to make my own BASIC racing game (I didn't know of ZShell at that time). It ended up similar to the previous game, but it was faster and much smaller (I managed to type in the entire thing in less than 2 minutes).

Anyway, soon after I learned that it was indeed possible to run machine code on the calculator through an amazing utility called "ZShell". Most of the information I was told about it (including the address of the ticalc.org web site) was wrong, but it did at least get me interested in assembly programming on the calculator. Around February 1997, I finally found the ticalc.org web site and learned more about ZShell. I couldn't actually start programming for ZShell until April 1997, when I finally got a Graph-Link. Early in May 1997, I made the Z-Kart game for ZShell. This was a 2-D game, but ran very smoothly due to being written in assembly. I didn't get to update it very much, because my calculator broke soon after programming it.

In August 1997, I got a new TI-85 so I could start programming for it again. At this time, I started thinking about making 3-D games on the calculator. Although I had mastered 3-D programming on computers by this time, I wasn't sure if I could get it to work well on the calculator. So I thought of an idea to "fake" a 3-D engine. After considering the idea for a few seconds (it's a bit strange, so I don't feel like trying to explain it here) I realized that it would probably look terribly. But I thought it might be funny to try it and see what happened. It was better than I thought, but still looked pretty awkward. However, I did show it to some people at school. Dustin Semach suggested that I fill in the sides of the screen, so I tried that and it did improve the game. At this point I was at version 2.0 (I think). Quite a while later, the game reached version 8.0 in which the (fairly minor) collision detection bugs in the game were finally fixed. Much later than that, I released the final version 9.0, which can be paused and gives you a bonus when you finish the game.