Start
You'll likely be greeted by a message saying ICE didn't find any programs to compile; this is expected as you don't have any ICE programs. Hit [CLEAR] or [GRAPH] to exit ICE and return to the homescreen. You may see a few strange graphical artifacts on your homescreen, these are just harmless artificats; hit [CLEAR] on the homescreen to clean them up.
Now it's time to create your first ICE program! An ICE program is created like any other program on your calculator. Hit [PRGM], [🡒], [🡒], [ENTER] and give the program a name you like, and hit [ENTER] again. Right now, this program doesn't do anything, and ICE won't do anything to it. Because ICE compiles programs into assembly and stores the assembly into another program, you need to specify the name of the other program the compiled code will be put into. To give your compiled program a name, place an imaginary i ([2nd], [0]) on the very first line of your program. This fancy i is called an "imaginary" and from now on will be referred to as i. Directly after i, type in a name for the program this will be compiled into. It must follow the standard program naming scheme: starts with a letter, is all capital letters or numbers, and no more than 8 characters.
This is your first program! If you exit the program editor and run ICE again, you will hopefully see your program appearing at the ICE homescreen. If not, please be sure the first character is an i!
Editing your ICE program can be done inside your calculator's program editor, or you can use instead Cemetech's online IDE, SourceCoder3. SourceCoder3 has full ICE support, including compiling on-demand, and it's much easier to write code on a computer. SourceCoder3 allows you to type in all of ICE's custom functions, graphics, and file I/O function names, and have the output automatically converted to the correct tokens. It also features syntax highlighting and indenting, giving you a nice organized look for your programming environment.
If you plan on using sprites and/or tilemaps, we highly recommend you use SourceCoder3, because it makes it much easier to paste in sprite/tilemap hex codes that you will need for graphical applications... You can also transfer already existing programs between SourceCoder3 and your calculator.