Besides Casio Basic and Add Ins, recently (since January 2005) there's even another method of writing programs for AFX calculators, called "MLC" ("Multi-Platform Language for Calcs"). This is also an interpreter language like Casio Basic, but widely superior to it as it provides way more features (like bitmaps, sprites, grey scales, procedures and and so on), and the interpreter in fact compiles an MLC program to bytecode before executing/interpreting it - MLC is much faster than Basic thus.
Pictures below showing screenshots of 4nic8's The Copter and Deimos' Lander. Try to implement it in Casio Basic 
Though MLC is not that powerfull that Add Ins are (e.g. good 3D games or very large/complex Jump'n Runs as you have them available as Add Ins will not be possible with MLC), it's lots more powerfull then built in Casio Basic, and facing Add Ins there are two significant benefits:
- On Calc - programming - you can make MLC games with the calc's program editor and there are even On Calc sprite editors available while you have to create Add Ins on a PC, furthermore writing Add Ins is much harder than coding Basic or MLC (whereas MLC is harder than Basic though). Therefore it's intended to become the successor of Casio Basic and Basic coders intended to use MLC by now (some use it already).
- The other point is that MLC is not designed for use with AFX calculators only, but, as "Multi-Platform Language" already says, also for inter platform compatibility. Today there are MLC interpreters available for AFX, most TI models as well as HP already (a complete list see below) and others might follow. Thus once you wrote an MLC game it will run on all of these calcs.
MLC Interpreters & Ressources
MLC is a project created by Epic Programming Studios, a union of Casio and TI coders. The interpreters are Add Ins, that, once you installed to your calc, can read out basic files where MLC source code is stored, compile/convert the source into a Bytecode and "execute" it (actual "interpret" it hence a kind of virtual machine is emulated rather like JAVA). MLC sadly isn't portable to Casio CFX series (a question that frequently is asked), as these calcs are not capable for Add Ins.
Available Interpreters:
- MLCafx 1.2 by 4nic8 for Casio Algebra FX series
- MLC86 2.5 by Burntfuse for Texas Instruments TI86 calculator
- MLCpc 0.97 by CrimsonCasio? for PC
- [Hawlet Packard version by ? /] TI 89/titanium/92/+/voyage 200 by 4nic8? / TI 82/83/+/se/84+/se/85 by [Burntfuse]/Madskillz/The Unknown One?
See Also:
Copyright (C) 2005 by Marco Kaufmann
