I know that there was an earlier hoax of a similar type of thing for the 83. . .but now that it's been done for the 86, wouldn't TI have done similar things with the other calculators? I mean, if you can unlock 15 or so with the 86, wouldn't you think that wouldn't be too much of a lofty number for the 83 too? Or is this not possible to do on the other lower calc, and we're stuck with the memory that we got?

Dan

Well, the 86 has much more memory and probably a lot more RAM. It would work on the 83 (if somebody ports it), but I doubt there's as much RAM on the 83 as the 86, just because of the ability of the 86.

You can't just port it over. This is calculator specific, and all the calculators are different. All the addresses are different and stuff. Someone would have to look around on the 83 to find a way to add more ram.

Also, I the 86 has a lot more memory. I think the 86 has 128K of RAM, while the 83 has (I think) only 32K of RAM to avoid having to use different pages.... So it would be quite hard to get 15K more than the current (I think) 27K....

The 83 only has 32kb of RAM, and so TI actually tried to be efficient with it. I doubt there are very many ways to get this kind of space out of any of the other calculators. As I mentioned in the article, it was almost too easy (almost like there used to be more RAM in the 86 at one time but they changed it...)

My guess is that they did, whatever the case, it comes in handy for that RPG I'm programming in Basic right now.
It does feature the use of strings to store most all data, which increases the speed of everything, and also decreases the size of the data.
Expect this to be released in 2 weeks.

I don't know 86 asm yet, or I would just program it in asm.
-Jon Johnson
Author of Future OS(for Usgard) for the Ti-85

gee, I wonder what program will win POTM... :P

You never know... people might like the new version of chmasc more than this! (New version should work on all ROMs, not just 1.2...) ticalc doesn't seem to have posted it yet. But soon.

!!It works on ROM 1.6!!

btw, LibSupport for the 86 RULES!

hah, give me a break; look at the situation SMA is in with the "right library versions." Then take into account the fact that we 86'ers don't have to go through that. Also take into account that libraries were made for saving space; then look at the amount of memory we have. 96k available (111k now with the expander). Then realize that libraries were made because calculators like the 83(+) needed them because they only have 27/24k of memory. Also realize the 89/92(+) has em because, naturally, m68k programs are kind of large (at least thats what I hear). We have enough space, so we don't really need to go through the inconvenience of having the wrong library versions or not being able to find the right libraries. Don't fix something that isn't broken.

by the way, don't write any more libraries, please; the 86 has gone this far (and how far it has come; emulation, expansion of memory, no kernels, shell-independant programs, et cetera) and most people don't want an inconvenience for a calculator so easy to use asm with

Except for the programmers... who really wants to define 50 romcalls at the beginning of every program...

- Jeff

apparently, acz did; they took the time to equate all the known 86 rom calls into neat little includes that are included when you #include TI86asm.inc (comes with ASM Studio).

So, no, you yourself do not have to equate 50 rom calls.

Nope. A Lib for the 86 sux BIGTIME. You really don't need it, it's only inconvenient because you need a library for one or two games or so. If this was done in the beginning, it'd be fine, but now I hope noone will ever use it. Besides, it's not built in in a shell, so you've got even more overhead than on other calcs

hey big big big idea... i was just talking with kirk and he agrees with me. to get programs to be compatible with this bad boy we have to make code a little more friendly. Instead of trashing RAM Page 1 (like i usually do) we gotta get a good routine going to find the end of all data in the ram and use the free space after whatever that is as temp storage; i have a few ideas. First, Jimmy Mardell used this technique in Sqrxz 1.1 (if you haven't read the source then you better soon!) and kirk enlightened me to the fact that most 85 programs indeed do as well. So, that's one idea. Also, the calc uses "temp" vars, so maybe some retrofitting of those routines could easily give us the key to unlocking free memory without overwriting other programs. I hope we can get a joint effort into looking in to this... i'll try my best but don't really have the time to wade through the ROM and haven't done so previously.

I agree; a lot of memory won't do you any good if you can't use it right.

right... waste all that newfound space, and slow things down while you're at it...
for some things having a known start address makes it a lot faster and easier, you don't have to find, store, and add an offset every time you want to access it.
as for temp vars, they're well documented for the 83+ and the code's probly mostly identical. the problem here is that it will involve more page swapping (at least twice as much) and it will require that you have more free space available when you run the program. this means that even tho you've got more ram, you can't use it all. (and the code has to use 24-bit pointers, bigger and slower again)
if you're writing some kind of math or science prog then who cares, but if you're writing a game, speed and size are important and it's much nicer to have a block of ram already allocated on your local friendly ram page 1.