A welcome addition. What are the programming capabilities of the Nspire currently?

I didn't even know you could program a TI-Nspire. cool.

The good: You can program libraries. One file that is a collection of tibasic programs. Other files can access them via filename\function().

The bad: Take the ti89's basic and remove:
a) drawing to the graph screen
b) input commands
c) the advanced dialog menu capabilities.

The basic editor is also in pretty print, some like it, others don't.

Libraries? That's pretty sweet.

When it comes to commands intended to display stuff on the screen or interactive commands, the TI-80 and TI-81 are still better.

Currently there are Nspire games, but in most of them you need to keep running the program over and over while entering values into variables manually when requested

Wow, that's *really* pitiful. That sounds almost like trying to make a game using only functions on the 89/92+/V200.

It seems really odd to me that TI would actually release a new calculator with virtually no programming support. They must be going in a totally different direction with the Nspire because this has never happened before with their graphing calcs.

I think either they:

-intended the calculator to be mostly for teacher
-purposely did it to prevent games developpement on these calcs
-decided to release an half assled product and update it later like Casio did with the Classpad 300 and TI did with the first 83+SE OS 1.13)
-got sued by game companies so that they make sure students no longer can port copyrighted games to calculators. I doubt they could sue the sites hosting such games cuz the games are on so many sites it is out of their controls by now.

That said, it must partially be why the calc sells poorly and TI almost had to drop the price to the same than the regular 84+. Over here a few months ago I could get a 84+ for $148 CDN and a Nspire for $160 CDN. It would would have costed me more to get a 84+SE ($177) or a titanium ($186), altough right now the Nspire rose by $10 and the Titanium/84+SE dropped by $10 over here.

-intended the calculator to be mostly for teacher

Right. They wanted to make the schools happy.

-purposely did it to prevent games developpement on these calcs

Right. See first.

-decided to release an half assled product and update it later like Casio did with the Classpad 300 and TI did with the first 83+SE OS 1.13)

Perhaps right. They are now adding support probably due to lagging sales.

-got sued by game companies so that they make sure students no longer can port copyrighted games to calculators. I doubt they could sue the sites hosting such games cuz the games are on so many sites it is out of their controls by now.

Totally wrong.

The Nspire seems like a product that was rushed to market.

>That said, it must partially be why the calc sells poorly

Do you think the ti81 was an instant hit the first year it was out? Or the 82 or the 85? Give it a couple years.

Here's my theory. They wanted to make sure the TI-CAS family doesn't make their other calculators obsolete.

Think of it like this... they still sell ti89 in Walmart, and various other shitty levels of ti below the 89, ridiculously overpriced. A reasonable price would be like $10.00, and still be overpriced.

Here's what wikipedia says:

TI-92 calculator, originally released in 1995,

The TI-89 ...developed... in 1998.

TI-92 Plus (or TI-92+) ... released in 1998

Voyage 200...released in 2002, being the replacement for the TI-92 Plus, with its only hardware upgrade over that calculator being an increase in the amount of flash memory available.

Summer of 2004 ...TI-89...replaced by...TI-89 Titanium.

So as you can see, they want to still be able to sell ti89-clones and ti92-clones.

Ultimately they will fail to sell many nspire variants, and fail to receive high adoption levels (despite trying to get teachers to force their students to buy them), and it won't be long... matter of months... before you can buy colored lids and crap, and theirs some new version of the nspire, with exactly the same internals, but more useless ram for non-existent ticalc programs.

Personally i don't see the ti-cas as a professional calculator or even college level calculator (where's the 3d graphic???)... definatelly just a school gimmick for high school.

The ti89 still is #1 (like ti planned).

OS 1.6 is also out for the nspire.

Wait, more programming capabilities? Can you draw yet or make text RPGs?

I doubt it, but hopefully maybe they will add I/O commands in the future. For now most games consist of running a program over and over while manually inserting values into variables when requested to choose an option. In other words, the TI-80 and 81 still has better programming capabilities right now *cough*Illusiat 81*cough*

Hey, I was reading about Illusiat 81 yesterday evening. I think I'm going to get my 14-year-old TI-81 back from my mom just so I can try it out. :-) I always regarded the TI-81 as being too limited to make anything better than a guess-the-number program.

that was actually fun to code because I am so used to make huge games under 163 KB of RAM and now I had 2400 bytes. I even managed to have ASCII maps and magic animations (altough the version shown on Youtube didn't had the animations)

but i got seriously advantaged because on a 81 matrices, real vars, home screen content, empty programs, program names, Y= vars, last entry and Ans won't take any RAM so even if you have 0 bytes of free ram the game still runs without any problem, altough if you have like 6 bytes of RAM and try to access the list editor you can crash your calc (Mem Cleared)

They must have fixed that bug in ROM v2.0 (which is what I have) since I can't seem to reproduce it. Trying to access the list editor, I simply get a memory error whether I have 0 bytes or 6 bytes or anything less than 16 bytes free, and nothing odd happens. If I free up at least 16 bytes, I can enter at least one data point.

Maybe you have an earlier model TI-81... I think I read a comment of yours on the Omnimaga forum about the TI-81 not having a lithium battery, and therefore it not being possible to change batteries without losing the memory. But my TI-81 *does* have a lithium battery, and I've always been able to change batteries without the RAM being cleared. Maybe that was something TI added in later models?

Yeah I think so, because I got the first of the 3 TI-81 models (first (1990-1991) had the small TI icon at the top to the right instead of the left, second (1992-1994) was moved to the left and third (1995-1997) didn't had it and had the TI-81 text white instead of yellow). Maybe 4 models though, because the first one shown on Datamath.org has a blue screen like the TI-82 and 85 and mine has a gray-ish hard to see screen like the TI-80, but yeah I guess they added the lithium battery later and fixed this bug in ROM 2.0. See link attached to this post for a video of what happened with 1.1 (altough crappy quality)

Mine is the second version, also with a grayish poor-contrast screen. The pictured one with the blue LCD is strange. I don't see why they would use the blue screen and then go back to the extremely poor grayish one (where you have to readjust the contrast for every little change in position you make). I would have thought they would switch to the better blue LCD technology in the later models.

My dad has an old 81, and according to the description, I think it's the second version too. I never realized that you could change the contrast on it until yor post, I just figured that you had to change your viewing angle to see it right.

Yes, you change it the same way you do on the other Z80 calcs—not that it helps much on that junky screen, though. :-) There are also only 10 contrast levels rather than 32, so you don't get as much fine-grained control, although my 81 manual claims there are 32 settings. I don't know if this is because some TI-81s actually had the full 32 settings or if that was just a copy-and-paste error from the other calc manuals.