It sounds amazing!

One question, though. \ I don't want to buy a new USB cable, when I have all of the necessary cable types to splice one together. I need know how to do that, and if it is possible.

I want to splice two male-female cables together so that I wind up with a female-female cable.

When I have that female-female cable, I will plug my flash drive into one end and the normal TI link cable into the other end.

I would greatly appreciate any help on this matter.

I've heard that people have spliced USB cables successfully, but what you propose wont work because the "normal TI link cable" (assuming you're talking about the one that goes from the calculator to the computer) has a mini-B plug, and you need a mini-A plug. The host (which is the calculator in this case) must have an A cable at it's end.

If you wanted to splice something, you'd have to use a mini-A plug, which you can find on the calc<->calc USB cable. But any case, splice at your own risk :)

You'd have to use a multimeter to figure out which wire is which, and use a pinout chart to figure out how to wire up the pins. The reason it's not easy is that you aren't supposed to. With normal USB, there is a "controller" device and a "controlled" device. Connecting two "controlled" devices together (via a female-female cable) will normally do nothing (like hooking a printer to your USB disk via the computer cable - nothing happens*) Likewise, a male-male cable (without special hardware in the middle) connecting, say, two computers, will probably do nothing - unless the computers blow up (figuratively speaking).

The USB On-the-Go specification is special, as two devices can /both/ act as "controller" or "controlled" as needed. This, however, is only allowed with the mini-USB ports as seen on the calculators. (Not everything that has these ports, however, is USB On-the-Go.)

*Some printers have USB ports on them - here they act as the "controller".

Now I'll go back to Tetris on my iPod. (Link)

Blast. Someone who knows more than I do beat me to it.

Yeah, but it's important to note that just because the OTG spec allows either of the devices to act as host doesn't mean both ends of the cable are the same. You still need one end of the cable to be an A-side and one end to be a B-side, and in the case of connecting a peripheral to the calculator, the calculator-side must be A. The A-side is wired differently so that it powers the bus, so if you have two B ends, your spliced cable wont work. So, to that end, if you're splicing a cable be sure the mini-plug you're using is a mini-A and not a mini-B.

....So it's pretty much easier to fork out $10 and buy a cable..

or even better -- go to RadioShack and get/order "GXQU-06" -- a universal USB cable

it lets you change the ends from whatever to whatever and it's only about $30 -- you can connect anything to anything

A UUSB cable?

-W-

that's what I thought but it works...what ever happened to that idea of one cable...

Its really not that hard, just use the calc to calc link ti provided, and splice with an old usb cable. its cheap and quick way to do it.

Would a USB Type A Female to USB Type A Female combined with the cable that comes with the 84s work? That's a cheaper solution.

ex. at the PC Connection website, item number 5641034

No. I tried this once and it didn't work, but I might just be crazy.

No, this wont work, because then you're plugging a mini-B plug into the calculator and the host must be connected to an A plug. (The calc<->PC cable has a mini-B plug. The calc<->calc cable has a mini-B plug on one end and a mini-A plug on the other)

Or you could install a standard usb a connector inside the calculator. That's what I did. To activate host mode, pin 4 needs to be pulled low. I have a switch inside my calc so I can swap between host and client mode manually. Now I can use standard usb A-A cables to connect to my pc, and I can plug flash drives directly into the calculator without adapters =D.

Pin 1 is closest to the center of the calc, pin 5 is towards the outside.
1: +5v when pin 4 is low.
2: Data-
3: Data+
4: OTG host/client sense.
5: Ground

I was *wondering* what had become of this just last week! I assumed that development had stalled. Glad to be wrong.

You've got to port this to the 89T!! With AVI to calc conversion tools already available, it'd herald the silent-era of movies all over again!

Seriously, though, think of all the lengthy intros you could have for games.

now what would be really cool is if there was a way to put a miniSD reader inside the calc

Mine works with a mini/micro sd card reader. I bet it would be possible.

w00t! Great Job! It works great for me!

Well, I have a few feature requests(This feels awkard to me for it being a free program.)
1.Could we have the ability to open .TXT documents?
2.Could we have the ability to accocaite(sp?) levels with games so we can have it play games w/ levels off of the memory stick?

Edit:N/M on the text document. But I have a bug report(and I couldn't find the appropaite section on WIKI.)

When I highlight a folder, it reports false sizes, like 2023MB(unless M stands for something else, and if it does, it is beyond me.) on a 512 MB drive.

The text document support will likely be added on to.

As for the sector problem, e-mail me and we'll get to the bottom of it. It's almost certainly a dumb mistake I made.

Eek...I combined all the problems on this page into one. :)

I'll look into the folder size thing.

And I'll be posting below about the guy with the FAT detection problem...

Very impressive! It works great most of the time!

I found these problems as I tried stuff:

1. When connecting to a USB printer/card reader it couldn't find the card -- probably not the program's fault

2. When using a USB-SecureDigital card reader, it thought a FAT16 SD card was FAT32 and told me to reformat it. It was FAT16 after checking.

3. Sandisk SDMX1 v1 MP3 player -- Error 1A0D;Sector size not supported. It is formatted the same settings as a 256 memory stick I used.

4. USB Floppy drive -- Error 0E00;Problem and msd8x can't continue

Works fine with:
1. SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro 2GB
2. Sandisk regular Cruzer Micro 256MB

I'll look forward to a FAT32 version some day so I can try a 40GB multi-partition portable HD (one with a power cord won't draw from USB power and therefore should work)

I'm happy to see you tried with lots of different drives. There are varying reasons why they wouldn't work, and I think I'll put up a page on those reasons, but here are my speculations:

1. Not sure. Could be power consumption issues, or it could use the CBI protocol.

2. I get this with a 1GB PNY Attache flash drive with a max power of 200mA. I don't really understand it, but seeing as how it's not supposed to work anyway, I'm brushing it off for the moment.

3. Could be power consumption issues, but my bet is on the CBI protocol. Others have gotten this same exact thing.

4. 0Eh is a Bad Class error, and I think you should try running it again. If you keep getting it, it's possible it's power consumption issues or the CBI protocol.

That sounds fair, I tried them all several times but I think it's still the greatest thing so far!

btw, it's probably power on the floppy drive, I looked and it needs almost the full 500mA to work, I'll play with this some more using a USB HD cable that boosts power up to 1Amp

scratch that, tried it on external power and it still failed. I'd still say I'm very impressed thus far.

re-reading the posts, I will say that the MP3 player installs to Windows as a USB flash card reader

I know everyone probably hates all my posts so close together but...I thought of something [more] to say...

As I was going to wash my car, I realized I didn't try all of my USB stuff. Here's another thing that doesn't work and I don't know why:

Sony USB 2.0 MicroVault 256; Error 1217, msd8x can't continue

As for why, I know it load the following upon insert to windows:
1. "Generic USB Hub"
2. "Sony Storage Media USB Device"
3. "USB Mass Storage Device"

I'm guessing it's more than just a USB drive. It won't work from DOS either so...maybe it's not the calc...

This is a very curious error. We might have to investigate this one. E-mail me.