Hey... a victory for all those diehard 86-lovers! Now everyone's got one of this manner of program! Dissassemblers everywhere can be happy!

Usefull - I'd say it's a good addition to any 86 programmer's toolbox.

there are diehard 86 hackers? ;p

Heck yeah! The 86 RULES!! :)

I saw this program yesterday (before the news) and thought it was a very nice and capable program, at least judging from its description and readme. I'll go download it now to see if it's any good.

If you downloaded version 0.9 and liked it, then it might be a good idea to download version 1.1 (it just got into the archives). There are a few bugs and missing features in 0.9, but I've fixed them in 1.1.

I tried the 1.2 version. It's pretty nice, but I have a few quesions.

1) What do the number and letter on the right side of the title bar mean? The title bar says something like (underscores are spaces) "SysHacker 1.2_________1___D" or "5___D". Are these

2) Why does nothing show up in the "asm" mode? (I ran it in VTI with ROM version 1.2)

I have some suggestions too:

1) "Link port com" exits when I type an invalid value, but it should stay in the Link port com mode. It should also show if it's in char or hex mode, maybe just a "C" or an "H" in the title bar.

2) When scrolling up in the hex edit, the cursor should go to the bottom of the previous page.

3) Use the regular A-F characters, not the hex A-F characters. The regular A-F are the same width as 0-9, so it would look better and be easier to line-up the hex

4) Accept either upper- or lower-case characters in the hex editor.

5) In "edit" mode, sometimes when I hit 2nd then hit EXIT, the editting part of the screen goes blank (the title bar and menu bar at the bottom are still there), and sometimes it goes to "hex" mode.

6) allow the user to delete characters in text entry boxes (e.g., "Go to address" and "Go to var").

7) can you speed up the printing in the hex mode? It's slow when scrolling long distances.

8) make the hex mode display possibly 8 bytes per line: the address takes 16 pixels, the 8 bytes in hex take 64 pixels, and the raw data on the right take 40 pixels (5 each), so there are 8 pixels left for padding. Perhaps 6 bytes per line would be better than 8. It's not as "round" as 8 but it's rounder than 5.

Besides these minor problems, it works pretty well. Thank you for this nice program!

Woops! In question 1 I didn't finish my question:

Are these (the number and letter) some kind of mode indicator?

As I said in the readme, they show which RAM page (the first one) and which ROM page (the second one) are currently being viewed.

That's strange about the disassembler...it works fine for me (with ROM 1.6).

Thanks for the suggestions-I'll try to implement them!

I added everything you suggested (except the delete key, which I'm working on), and I'll upload it as soon as possible.

Yes!!!!!

When I saw the screenshot, the first thing I thought of was Command Post. I was kinda surprised when I saw it was for the TI-86... you don't see as many TI-86 programs anymore. Anyway, congrats to the author and all. It looks nice. :)

What exactly is a link console (in non-assembly-programmer terms)?

It lets you send / recieve individual bytes through the linkport. It's useful for debugging any linking software. You can also do fun things with it, like on the 83+ you can send keypresses over the linkport, so you could use Calcsys's Link Console to do this.

Hey, this is great. I find it hard to believe that a program like this was never made. I do believe it, because obviously it is true, but still....

-W-

I found it hard to believe too...that's why I wrote this program. It was annoying having to keep about 5 different progs on my calc just to do the same things as System Hacker, and always having to remember addresses, var names, etc. when switching between them.

Why did I stop talking to you on AIM anyway?

-W-

I think we ran out of things to talk about. ;-)

Oh my god, I never thought I'd get a program featured!!!!!! Thank you, file archivers and news editors!!!!

If anyone has suggestions for more features in this program, please e-mail them to me. I hope that someone finds it useful...

Of course it's useful. My code tends to juggle register pointers to memory, and I'm sure it will be useful in making sure if I've indexed an array properly. Thanks for the neat prog!

The fact that you wrote it for the 86 gives you lots of brownie points in my book :-)

I just noticed today (when running a counting script I made) that this is my one hundredth news item :)

100th total? Cool. That's a lot of articles!!!