I started with a BASIC manual.
I learned to program with a Texas Instruments and a manual. Among the memories I kept, there was a pretty precise one: a figure that was built by painting the screen.
Part two: a program for Messi →And I found it.
I used to copy the programs, run them, and then start changing things to see what happened.
Over 40 years later I found the original manual. I also found a figure that looks a lot like the one I remembered: The Giant.
Today, Sunday, September 20, 2026, I uploaded the manuals to ChatGPT and we started rebuilding it. We're doing it from my phone, while I watch a series.
The program.
This is the BASIC from the manual. RUN executes the whole thing. STEP lets you go through it one line at a time.
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Change something. Run it. See what happens.
A program for Messi.
Today is Messi's last match. I wanted to thank him somehow and I ended up going back to the same place: a BASIC, a light blue screen and something that gets painted little by little.
The photo is stored in the DATA lines. Each group of three numbers says which row a color goes in, where it starts and where it ends. The program reads them and paints them, one color at a time, from darkest to lightest.
A heads up: the TI-99 couldn't draw a photo from BASIC. It had 8×8 characters and few colors per group. So I added a single instruction that isn't in the manual, CALL HLINE, which paints a line of dots. The rest is BASIC like back then.