Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Posted by Ryan on 10 July 2012, 02:48 GMT
As we continue clearing off the news desk, we bring you some extremely big news in the realm of emulation. Once upon a
time, we were all thrilled about the release of TilEm, a rather powerful and successful calc
emulator that aided users and programmers alike. Recently, the calculator deities have handed down from on high TilEm 2.0, a release so ridiculously packed
with features that it is maddening. A quick glimpse at the user manual reveals the amount of work, with the utmost
attention to detail and usability, applied towards this project. It seems as though customizability has been
a major improvement in TilEM 2.0 with regards to appearance, screenshots, and interface features. Jump to after the break
for the official release announcement and run, don't walk, to download and start using TilEm 2.0 today!
TilEm is dead, long live TilEm2
Benjamin Moody (floppus maximus) and myself Thibault Duponchelle
(contra-sh) are proud to announce the first release of TilEm2.
You probably already know TilEm "old" because it was a good emulator serving the community since 2000 (written by Julien Solignac then improved and maintained by Moody Benjamin). For those who don't know, TilEm is an emulator that reproduces behavior of z80-based Texas Instrument calculators (TI73 through TI86 including the TI81 :p). As with other emulators, TilEm2 needs an official ROM, of course.
TilEm old was available for GNU/Linux natively then ported to Windows and Mac.
TilEm2 is already available for GNU/Linux and Windows (TilEm2 is likely to work on Mac OS X, but we have not tested it). 3 years ago, I joined the team and we started to work on a new version of TilEm.
Even if it seems to be a sequel, all the code was written from scratch, including a new emulation core written by Benjamin. This new version is released for beta testing.
It features highly detailed hardware emulation.
TilEm 2's hardware emulation is greatly improved - it's now at least on par with, and in some cases better than, any other emulator released to date.
All of the z80 models are supported (including both hardware revisions of the TI-81 and both revisions of the TI-82); the only part of the hardware that is not currently emulated is the TI-84 Plus USB controller.
Sending/receiving programs, variables, and applications:
TilEm2 uses libticalcs and provides visual feedback by printing progress and allowing cancel.
You can send single or grouped vars, flashapp, or whatever you want.
A nice receive window allow you to save programs from your calc to you computer.
There's also the possiblity to send and receive to and from the TI-81.
Grayscale emulation:
TilEm has had grayscale support for many years (originally an FIR filter supporting only 4 levels; later changed to an IIR filter supporting 64 levels, but with a tendency to flicker.)
TilEm 2, however, uses a completely new grayscale algorithm based on a modified FIR filter, which should work a lot better.
Saving screenshots:
You can record animations (gif) or simply grab a static screenshot (png,
bmp, gif output and more...).
There's a lot of setting as size (at least 3 default size per model plus
custom size), foreground/background color, animation speed.
And of course a preview window to see before saving what you have done.
A full featured debugger for assembly programming:
With memory view (could be edited), disassembly view, registers (could be
edited), stack, breakpoints, step by step, and more...
Macros:
It allows recording key presses and automatic execution (at startup or when
you load the macro file).
New pack of skin and new skin format (TiEmu skin file):
You can now do a skin for TilEm2 in 15 min and you can do some funny stuff
(see the documentation about skins).
This version has a new and improved user interface, as well as many
improvements to the hardware emulation.
See the project website at http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tilem/ for more
information.
This release is only a step, development goes on. We will add some new features to TilEm2 soon. In addition to the features you will request and bug we will have to fix.
Please report bugs and feature request (on the Sourceforge forum:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilem/forums/forum/84646
Have fun with TilEm2 !!!
The current maintainers of TilEm are *Thibault Duponchelle* and *Benjamin Moody* (but many other people have played a part in making this program possible, especially Hugues Luc Bruant "fullmetalcoder" who started a QT GUI and helped us a little for other stuff, and Scott Zeid who provided the pictures from which we based the icons).
