Nick, I must say that if I were in Chicago, and I was at the regional competition, I would have recognized you as being a ticalc.org member (tm).
Congrats on being able to go to states.

PS:
Last year I was a member of my school's science olympiad team, and I 0wned battery buggy, coming in 2nd nationally. (4th in Road Scholars and 7th in Surf the Net)
Science Olympiad 0wns everyone.

Illonois has regionals for Science Olympiad? Here in New Jersey we've only got states. . . (ok, no wisecracks about the smell necessary)

Ours is Tuesday. Our school leaves BEFORE the awards - that's how bad we are. Won a 5th and a 2nd last year, and that's it.

Two years ago, on our middle school team, we can in LAST in all but 6 events (new teacher didn't know what he was doing).

There was one trial event where they gave use 2 index cards, 8 straws, 4 paper clips, and told us to make the tallest thing we could that can hold a 60-gram weight. It was redicukous and just a trial event which didn't count, so I just put them all in a pile which I KNEW couldn't hold the weight and left. I can in 6th, one away from an award =)

I had the honor of meeting Nick Disabato himself at last year's national competition in Chicago. Let me tell you, the rumors about him are GREATLY exaggerated . . .

Lol. And what rumors might these be?

That he's normal? human? a male (sorry, inside joke for Nick there)?

Apparently I haven't heard any of these rumors or I would have understood that one.
And yes, I did meet KGBHitman (Stuart) last year in May. I've met/talked to a lot of people irl from #ti/ticalc.org, actually.

--IRREVOCABLY IN POINTLESS INFORMATION MODE--

For your viewing pleasure, here's a list of the people I've met:
- Filler
- KGBHitman (Stuart)
- t][berius
- toral
- hanley
- twidget
And when I was at CWRU, I saw someone who looked /way/ too much like DJaCKaL in a hallway, but I didn't bother to say anything. (DJ goes to CWRU for those of you who don't know.)

Here's a list of the people I tried to meet, but miserably failed:
- micros
- SCaBBy
- picasso

And here's a list of the people I've talked to on the phone:
- all those who I've met except KGBHitman
- micros
- aselle
- ldspartan
- Cubic
- at0m
- Paradox
- Johhn
- codelogic
- Levine
- _bryan_ (Rittmeyer)
- Dan1son
- Dan1son's sister :-)
- Chris
- Nathan Haines
- picasso
- Synth (remember Shoutcast? :)
- Whoever else was on that 10-person conference call who I forgot to mention. Man, that was crazy.

Hopefully I'm going to be meeting Sh0gun in May, too :)

--BlueCalx

Nick and I were *supposed* to meet last year at nationals. Well, it turned out that Nick went the wrong way, missing me by 23 minutes.
micros.

Winning Science olympiad Regionals around here(New Mexico) is a joke. Not very many schools have what it takes to get first. Socorro (both High and Middle) Get first and second every year. What is really hard is the State competition, there we have to go up against academy(rich bastards) and usually, we lose by some small amount of points. This year it was 4.

Anyway, good job on VTI, perhaps I'll d/l. I doubt it.

And wasn't regionals Feburary 2nd? Hasn't Nationals Already happened? How are you posting this? Some sort of time dialation machine? I want one.

No, nationals has NOT already happened :)
States in our state happen next week....

didn't you guys have a massive power outage that stopped the state HS basketball game?

To all those looking for calculator ROM's to be used with VTI, go to this address:

+------------------+
|ticalcroms.cjb.net|
+------------------+

Or click on the URL below my name. This is a temporary site, I don't know how long I'll keep it there, so go there fast. Sorry about the appearance of the page, I made it in a hurry. Happy program testing!

- Jeff

Of course I couldn't condone such a site....
But well done anyway :)
- Definately Not David Hall of SiCoDe Software

you know, of course, that's very much illegal, and you'll probably get shut down pretty soon

Hosting calculator ROM's is illegal. Yeah. Right up there with tearing the tags off mattresses. I doubt the average server admin even knows what a TI calculator is.

- Jeff

Oh and yeah I forgot to say...

My purpose for holding these isn't to be illegal, or deprive TI of money. I just want to make programmers' lives easier. I know all too well about calculator crashing, it's annoying to have to go get a screwdriver and play with batteries every time you forget to do something in a program. If this kinda stuff offends you, don't d/l it, but I'm sure people who for some reason can't get their calculator to send a ROM (like me), will.

And like I said, it's temporary.

- Jeff

if the person/people who made VTI wanted to, he'd have all the ROMs come with VTI, but he/they didn't because he/they know it is illegal.

Besides, why would you program for a calc that you don't have?

thanks man!!!
that's what I was looking for!
Although it's illegal I like it.
THANX!!

Well, in my case, the EMU is more functional than my calculator. For some reason, the new Zelda demo works fine on VTI, but the screen appears garbled on my calc! (83 v1.10). I only wish the progs would work on my calc, oh, whatever could the problem be?

check out Void Productions, http://void.calc.org

sam posted a bug fix for the 83 port, that runs fine on ROM 1.1 or higher

ohhhhh, SWEET!

You know, MANY other high GFX ASM progs have that problem too. I wonder how to fix it...

I know that VTI emulates more instructions than real MC68000 has (it emulates some 680xx instructions). That's why some programs created by me worked fine on VTI, but caused a crash on real TI-89 (I didn't know that instructions which I used are not legal). This is just one example of "overfunctionality" of VTI. Also, alpha version of my program CBlaster worked fine on VTI, but caused "Protected memory violation" error on real TI-89 :-)

Huh? X. Vassor (Doors guy) said that the M68k didn't have a protected mode. So who's wrong?

And anyway, remember that VTI is based on the MAME, which provided the CPU emulation. Any flaws in that aren't Rusty's fault (and besides, you shouldn't be using instructions that aren't there, should you -- but then again, your assembler would have to know about them in order to let you use them (normally), so something's wrong. Maybe there was just a bug in your program :-).

Speaking of M68k's, when are we going to get a Linux kernel for the dang thing? (Support is there for the m68k processor itself; and architecture stuff should not be that hard, because there is not that much architecture, period (linkport, LCD, RAM, flash ROM, keypad, and..., and..., what else?).

So what if you can't run anything on it -- just being there would be a big start :-). Actually, there is quite a bit of memory on the 89/92+, enough probably for kernel, a shell (bash?) shared libraries, and _maybe_ a really stripped down gcc... forget about X (unless one calculator was an X server and the other ran the clients, and they networked over the linkport -- cool? Enlightenment WM for my calc :-).

Okay, this post is much too big. See ya.

-Ken

Nobody is wrong. MC68000 has not protected mode, but TI-89 has built in an additional device which protects certain memory zones.