Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain "roms" Liévin

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Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain "roms" Liévin
Posted by Xavier on 16 February 2025, 18:12 GMT

Today, we're carrying the sad news of the passing of Romain "roms" Liévin. It was relayed by François "mmu_man" Revol.

In this TI graphing calculators community, Romain was especially an instrumental part of the Linux Programmers Group, which brought the community pieces of libre, portable software (usually working on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows) for communicating with and emulating the TI graphing calculators we've come to love: libticonv, libtifiles(2), libticables(2), libticalcs(2), and their better-known TILP (II), TIEmu and TilEm front-ends respectively. The ability to communicate with (almost) the entire lineup of TI graphing calculators through a single, unified API, in its second iteration, is unmatched.

In 2007, he visited TI EdTech in Dallas, picking up a variety of calculators and cables to aid in further development of the communication libraries. TI doesn't want to invest in porting their software to Linux and the BSDs, and does usually no longer provide documentation, but helps select persons with hardware donations. Even to this day, few members of the user community had such a level of interaction with persons on TI's payroll.

Professionally, Romain was teaching some aspects of computer science and physics, and had additionally undertaken a PhD.

I met him several times over the years, and picked up his set of calculators and cables in 2010, in order to carry forward the maintenance and evolution of the LPG stack, mostly working on the libraries. A nice and smart person, with a good long-term vision for the community. It showed in decisions such as requiring that some features remain optional in TIEmu; this enabled TIEmu to remain usable into the 2020s with minimal maintenance, so despite the slight additional complexity it brought, time has now shown that it was the right way forward.

mmu_man will keep the memories from him at the engineering school, where we were young and technology was cool and interesting. That's when he remembers him smiling.

Article written by Lionel Debroux with a tribute of François "mmu_man" Revol.

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Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Jim Bauwens
Sad to hear about his passing. Very grateful for the contributions that he made over the years - they were fundamental to a lot of the 68k scene.
Reply to this comment	23 February 2025, 15:27 GMT

Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Patrick Prendergast
Very sad news, RIP.
Reply to this comment	26 February 2025, 09:31 GMT

Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
TheStorm
While Roman was on his way out of the community as I joined I likely would not be where I am now if not for his work on libti* and associated tools. His legacy will live on in all the people his work has touched and helped even indirectly 16 years later and for many more to come.
Reply to this comment	26 February 2025, 16:37 GMT

Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Kevin Kofler (Web Page)
Extremely sad indeed. At 45 years, he was only 3 years older than me! That is way too young to die! I remember the CD-R he sent me with the latest development sources of TIGCC/Linux when he handed over that project to me in 2002. (I probably still have that lying around SOMEWHERE, but I cannot find it right now.) Romain and I did have some disagreements on technical details (he was a Debian fan, I preferred Fedora and CentOS; he insisted on using an ancient version of Visual C++ for Windows builds, often limiting the C language features we were able to use, whereas I used MinGW/MSYS initially, then cross-MinGW; etc.), but we still went along nicely. What I am not happy with is Lionel abusing his obituary for Romain to hide a snide remark against me in it. Only the initiated will understand it, but the mention of "decisions such as requiring that some features remain optional in TIEmu" is clearly directed against me, and I consider it very off topic in an obituary. The main feature Lionel is talking about there is undoubtedly the C debugger (GDB/Insight) integration, which is an essential feature for C developers, one of the main target user bases of TiEmu. Any build of TiEmu without that feature is entirely useless for C developers, so not maintaining that feature essentially means Lionel is not maintaining TiEmu.
Reply to this comment	6 March 2025, 00:48 GMT

Re: Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Kevin Kofler (Web Page)
Correction: 4 years older actually. His 46th birthday would have been before my 42nd. But it does not really matter. This is all way too young to die.
Reply to this comment	6 March 2025, 04:16 GMT

Re: Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Kevin Kofler (Web Page)
Or was it François who wrote that sentence about the TiEmu features remaining optional? Whoever wrote it, it does not belong there in my view.
Reply to this comment	6 March 2025, 20:41 GMT

Re: Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Le Breton Cédric
I remember that french devs where rude with you on yaronet...and you were reacting each time :) All of you (i talk about people doing deep/system programming on 68k) so much impressed. I'm sure it significantly impacted my life. I can only say thank you and being sad for Romain Lievin....But he is not really dead as his programs still impact the world :)
Reply to this comment	10 March 2025, 14:28 GMT

Re: Re: Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Le Breton Cédric
I remember that french devs were rude with you on yaronet...and you were reacting each time :) All of you (i talk about people doing deep/system programming on 68k) so much impressed me. I'm sure it significantly impacted my life. I can only say thank you and being sad for Romain Lievin....But he is not really dead as his programs still impact the world :)
Reply to this comment	10 March 2025, 14:32 GMT

Re: Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain roms Liévin
Nikky Southerland (Web Page)
Aw shucks. This is rough to hear. Romain was huge
Reply to this comment	21 March 2025, 23:44 GMT