This may be the one reason that pushes me over to buying that 84+SE I've been wanting. I've seen this on the Upcoming… page on DS's site, and it's certainly a breakthrough.

MV has done it again...nice job.

I never could get VTI to run on my computer, so this is great.

Why not? It's just an executable, not instalation involved.

I'm guessing he probably had ROM issues.

VTI didn't work on my win98 either... It has nothing to do with ROM issues, in uploaded the rom of my 83+ fine.

Alas, if it's anything like the Beta - it wont work on my 83+ (standard) :'(
*duh*
Viva la 83 plus! Nifty emulator :)
I only hope that USB related apps will somehow be ported to 83+ (standard) with use of the i/o link in the future (ie: Thumbdrive Explorer)

>> I only hope that USB related apps will somehow be ported to 83+ (standard) with use of the i/o link in the future (ie: Thumbdrive Explorer)

No chance in hell.

*cries*

This is a very interesting developement... Now make a Z80 emulator for the 68K calculators.

YES! YES! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would LOVE THAT!!! Michael_V you hear us?!?!? :P This would make it so I could carry my 83+ and 89 all in one :D

The program is designed for the TI-83+/SE and the TI-84+/SE to emulate the other z80 calculators. The TI-89 is a 68K calculator (different chip architecture...)

Yes, I understand, but you must agree that it could very well happen, if at a slow rate...

Another thing that would be interesting is a TI-BASIC emulator that emulates, say, 84+ TI-BASIC for the 68k series.

actually I've been thinking about doing that... does MirageOS have a BASIC interpreter in it? I wouuld like to learn form it to make my own

Even better would be a BASIC compiler, but that's just a dream...

There wouldn't be much of a difference. :^)
I don't know much about assembler or low-level calc stuff, but I'm pretty sure that the OS just converts the code/tokenized text into bytecode.

OK, what's the difference between a For loop in BASIC and in C?

There goes your difference...

A compiler would make a world of difference. If BASIC could be compiled into native z80 code, the execution rate (and code possibilities) would most likely increase, depending on how well the compiler optimizes (i.e. some BASIC tokens may compile into bloated code).

Exactly, thus saving you the time to convert each line while running the program, at the very least. As the program gets longer, this becomes more of a time-saver. Of course, error-trapping would become a really big issue...

I think it uses TI's interpreter.

Well I didn't write MirageOS, but I know it would be serious overkill to write a whole new BASIC interpreter. I'm sure it just uses the API call to run a BASIC program.

It does. It invokes TI-OS to interpret BASIC code.

Yep!

Beep the chip architecture. Someone (I don't remember who) managed to emulate the Game Boy on the 68k series, right? So why isn't it possible to emulate the z80 series on the 68k series?

The emulation isn't flawless, though. The problems not only occur in the different screen sizes, but in the completely different chip architectures. I'm not sure you fully appreciate the differences between the 8-bit z80 RISC chips and the 32-bit 68K CISC chips. To fully emulate the TI-OS, you would probably have to rewrite the entire API from scratch into 68K code, and RISC code doesn't port very well to CISC code.

The Z80 isn't a RISC architecture; it's a CISC architecture.

Interesting. I was so sure it was a RISC!

But still, z80 emulation on a 68K chip is *still* problematic in that the instruction sets are totally different. The fact that z80 chips are CISCs only furthers the complications associated with providing a runtime environment capable of translating instructions. Emulating a CISC on another CISC introduces the problem of parsing instructions of variable size, which would reduce execution speed further! *sigh* If only TI used RISCs...emulation would be a lot easier.

But assembly programming would be a lot harder.

duh. but if you write a program to run the 83+'s arcitecture OVER the 89's (this would have to be EXTEREMELY fast though :( ) then you could run the ROM over that, 83+ ASM would be stupidly hard to do, but BASIC is easier to token to run on the 89

That's the problem! The 68K chips used by TI are too slow to FULLY emulate a completely different architecture at the software level.

There already is one. GB68K. Granted, it's for the GameBoy, but it's (more or less) a z80 emulator.

The gameboy uses a stripped down Z80 (no IX/IY registers), so adapting gb68k to emulate the 8x series of calculators wouldn't be trivial. It'd be a pretty good place to start though. I don't think I'll do it, but if someone else wanted to give it a shot, I'd be happy to help out.

Everyone is always so demanding in the TI Community. Good to see an atricle written by Jon tho :-p

Yes, I understand that this would be quite a project, but it would be very rewarding if it actually worked.

Yay, someone noticed :)

That's probably because some people here are paranoid about news editor bias, so Michael doesn't post news items about his own programs.

Hehe...I know ;-) Used to work with him!