How was this possible on a device with only a black and white screen? Most emulators were able to detect that the application was doing grayscale and produce a clean rendering of it On top of that the game was not just a tech demo it had a fully featured storyline and pretty good sprite art. The first thing I remember being really wowed by was an RPG game called Desolate by Patrick Prendergast (tr1p1ea), which boasted four level grayscale. Rather, this game is famous because it is one of the oldest, and Patrick and others have ported it to nearly every single z80 calculator ever released. The reason it is famous is not because it is fun-although it is-nor because it’s well implemented-although it is. It’s a top-down space shoot-em-up similar to the arcade game Galaxian.
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And of course massive kudos to the Internet Archive for preserving it all!Įasily the most famous 3 graphing calculator game is Phoenix by Patrick Davidson. Please do email me with corrections if you find a newly dead link. I was, however, a pretty good self-taught calculator programmer-more on that in a later article… NoteĪ fair number of these links are starting to rot because development happened 20 years ago. Those who followed calculator hacking news will surely recognize the individuals I’m calling out here, either by their name or, more likely, by their handle.įor my own part, I was almost entirely a lurker, largely due to the influence of my parents who were not keen on talking to people online.
#Downlaoding ti84 plus ce emulator on mac free#
TI provided a very good SDK documentation about subroutines provided by TI-OS (and official support for Asm() programs), and with that you pretty much had free rein over the system. There were several guides for learning assembly, but the best was by Sean McLaughlin (“eeems”), Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly in 28 Days. This diagram is heavily simplified, but you’ll notice the lack of any horsepower at all. The z80 is an 8-bit machine, with 16-bit pointers, so although archive was technically memory mapped, it wouldn’t all fit-it was actually paged in to a 16KB “window”: The z80 assembly 2 programming environment was pretty spartan: there was no supervisor or memory protection, so if you had a bug you were probably going to crash the calculator (the dreaded “RAM Cleared” message). The 84 Plus had USB and a redesigned case, but the system was the same. I will use “TI-84 Plus” throughout here because it’s very likely the model you’re familiar with however, it was more often referred to as the TI-83 Plus because they were basically identical. The most popular graphing calculators were of course the TI-83/84 Plus, which every American student for the past decade and a half has probably seen. Needless to say, this is the very definition of a constrained environment. On the models with flash, support for launching large “apps” stored exclusively in flash.TI’s operating system “TI-OS” (they call it “EOS” but nobody else does).Generally, 32KB of RAM, and on the 83+ and later, anywhere from 100KB to 2MB of flash storage (“archive”).A link port which (ab)used the 2.5mm headphone jack connector.The latest models finally have higher resolution color screens.) 96圆4 black and white LCD (a few models had a larger screen but this was by far the most common.z80 processor usually clocked at 8 or 10MHz-and note that the z80 can only retire one instruction every 4 cycles.They were quite nice 45 years ago when they were released!Īll TI calculators generally had similar low-end specs: You might have heard of the z80-it was an improved version of the Intel 8080 developed by Zilog.
Throughout the 90s and 2000s, TI released a succession of z80-based graphing calculators. I do plan to continue the articles I’ve started! Thanks to everyone who has emailed to check on me-and I apologize for not being super responsive over email. In the space of a year I’ve gotten a new job, bought a house, moved. Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence with xkcd.
There are also 768 bytes in the RAM buffer used to hold TI display bitmaps. I’ll take you through some of the highlights of Texas Instruments calculator hacking done over the past two and a half decades, along with an explanation of why these projects are so technically impressive. True to my interests, it’s all deeply embedded, pushing the limits of platforms that were obsolete when they were released. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to their will, writing games, math software, and more generally hacking on the platform just for the sake of it. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vaccuum. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school.
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