What I did in the Dope Wars: I taught myself how to program, backwards. I downloaded Dope Wars and an ASCII racing game known as "INDY500" and went through the code line by line, looking each programming function up in the official TI-82 guide book.
Once I understood enough, I rewrote both programs from scratch, from memory. I then proceeded to expand Dope Wars so that it was no longer about traveling a city to trade drugs. I turned it into a full-on text-based Final Fantasy fangame, so expansive and sprawling it eventually crashed my TI-82 for running out of memory if you played it too long.
Imagine something more similar to The Oregon Trail, but you were traveling between Final Fantasy towns following a story. Every time you reached a new town, you'd be given an option of which road to take to the next town, and through that, sort of like Zork or something, you could begin to understand the shape of this world a little. (Note: I'd never played Zork or any text adventures at all)
Travel would naturally take time, and that's where random battles would happen. Story events would happen at cities. Battles were expanded from Dope Wars own system of battling with cops/gangs, but now you could cast spells, find and equip better gear, and there were even summons.
The Final Boss was Sephiroth because this was 1998 and my Final Fantasy Fandom was at an all time peak.
It's a shame those calculators erase their stored memory when the batteries died.