Okay, so VTI supports the black link, grey link, and the homemade serial link... How about the parallel? it's in the menu, but greyed out. And there's no mention on whether it's implemented yet. Is it just me?

But I must say, VTI is the GREATEST emulator ever... and the new version has been GREATLY improved...

Hey... you PC Guys are lucky, being able to emulate any TI Calculator... we Mac users only have MacTiger and fairly incomplete TI-81 and TI-85 Emulators... Couldn't someone puh-leeeeze port this to Mac? How about the guy that wrote MacTiger? Is it me, or is this website (and many other calc sites, including TI itself) biased against Macs? VTI for Macintosh would be a great idea...

-whytookay

Well, considering only 158 of our ~4500 account holders are Mac users, I'd say you guys receive more than your fair share of attention. It's too bad Mac users get the shaft, but with so few Mac TI users it's tough to find programmers.

Chris

um... I was a Mac TI user... until TI released the pin adaptor for PCs (I know I could have gotten one from Radio shack, anyway) anyway... I'll be a Mac user again once G4s are more widely available, I hope I hope... just in case anybody cares

The source code is very specific to Borland Builder. Much of it would have to be rewritten to be ported to the Mac. Besides, no one in ACZ likes Macs :)

MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC
MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC
MAC MAC
MAC We need VTI for the Mac, really! MAC
MAC MAC
MAC We need also a USB Graph Link! :) MAC
MAC MAC
MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC
MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC

Even though I don't like MACs (mostly because there are few good games for it), I do think that a USB graphlink would be a good idea.

I dunno, but wouldn't a USB Graphlink be overkill? USB is pretty fast, while the Graphlink only likes 9600 bps transmission (trout me if I'm wrong) ...

USB's top speed is 12Mbit/s. Some 8-bit microcontrollers like the Motorola 6805 have USB interfaces, so they are pretty much ready to build a USB link. The creator of PIC Link could, PLEASE, port his program to a USB micro!

Yes! A USB Graph Link would be awesome!! Seeing that my main computer is an iMac, and also seeing that I have to use a near-defunct Mac SE/30 to transfer Calculator programs to my four calcs, It would be a great idea. Now. I have a question for anyone out there who's able to answer it. I am well aware that the black graphlink is only compatible with Win95/98/NT so far. I know there is some kinda microcontroller in the gray one that makes it RS-232 (and therefore Mac) compatible. But-- if I were to get an USB to 9-pin serial adapter and plug the gray one into my iMac's USB port, couldn't that work? USB is nothing like RS232. I think it's worth a try. By the way, if you don't have a PC and wanna emulate a calculator, you have to get MacTiger. It supports 92 and 92plus. If you want any others, I'm afraid the only choice is to get the rather useless 81 and 85 emulators available. the 85 emulator is useless cause it doesn't support the graphlink. I'm just wondering if you could use a TI-89 with MacTiger... it seems possible...

-whytookay

p.s. if there are any Mac and TI-Users besides me that can program Z80 or 68k ASM, I wanna know. I don't know jack about asm programming and would like to learn how to use the 89's Exec command. The TI documentation is to cryptic for me to understand.

I have a TI-83+, but not a Graph-Link Cable, I extracted the base file from TI's Flash upgrade, but it's in hex code. How can I convert it to use with VTI?

Can't. *.hex files are converted on the fly by TI's FLASH Installer as it sends it to your calc. So unless someone finds a way of back engineering the FLASH Installer and seeing how TI does it, there is no way to make that into a ROM Image. Your basically out of luck. On th upside though, Black Graphlinks are only about $20 (USD), and then you can use it for all your calcs, and send progs whenever you want.

Black Graphlinks? Where can I get one?

You can buy the black graph link at Staples for $20.

Well, not just there, almost everywhere.

Officemax- $17.99
Office Depot-$17.99
Target-$20.49
Wal Mart-$21.68

I should really pay less attention to those price tags.

The hex-file is an intel-hex file and contains 3 files: 2 small ones and 1 large file: ti83+ rom... I've wrote a basic program to extract the files from the hex file, but when i run VTI, i can't select a 83+... i think i did something wrong in the conversion... Can someone tell me how large the rom-file should be (bytes)??? in that case i can check the rom-file/conversion program...

The 83+ ROM Size is 524,288 bytes, or exactly 512 KB.

Ahhh... so there is our problem: the large (rom)file in the base112.hex is just 224Kb (the whole hex-file is just 540 kb, so this is not a conversion bug!)...
I think the base file just contains the a part of the rom (the part that can be flashed), to make sure nobody uses the flash-update to run an emulator...

What is the 89's real rom size? maybe if we do a little # crunching we may be able to find the key

The .tib size is 1,143,707 bytes. The next multiple of 128KB which is what the rest of the calcs' roms are multiples of is 1310720, or 1280 KB. The .tib file doesn't divide evenly into KB. maybe I've given someone an inspiration.

VTI may be a nice emulator and all that, but it makes writing programs for the 86 a nightmare. It handles all the undocumented z80 opcodes correctly (or at least all the ones that I've tried) yet doesn't support port 4. Is there any way of detecting the VTI (I can detect every other emulator) so that the user doesn't get a screenful of rubbish when running really clever games?

Keesh

Umm...how many 86 programs use port 4? The only thing it controls is interrupt speed and screen width, neither of which have any use in programs. It is used by the ROM on bootup to set DMA and such, but outside of that has no use. Possibly for making a smaller screen to use hardware clipping, but this would be pretty stupid to do.'


What "really clever" games are you refering to?