Cool! So that means TI did screw up trying to "fix" the bugs in their OS that enable something like that. Maybe they couldn't figure out how these programs work. :-)

The patch seems to work under AMS 2.04 on my HW 2 92+, it doesn't crash anymore when I try to run an asm program that requires a kernal.

Don't be so naive: TI surely know how these unprotections work. Their engineers are surely not so stupid that they can't dissasemble 500 bytes of machine code and to understand what is the point. This task takes about 20 minutes for me: I don't think that I am more clever than TI engineers ;-)

Sure you are! :-) You have to remember that these are not the best programmers of the world. It's just one of so many software companies out there. Each single one of them doesn't have any intention to disassemble any of the programs at ticalc.org. I don't think they have any investigators over here, either. Also, they are probably no hackers, and have no experience in disassembling code (just like me). Of course, I may be wrong, but if they could, they probably would disable any modification of the Flash ROM.

Has anyone played monkeybomb it is the bomb!!!!!!!!! I love that game I am surprised that it did not get a feature on ticalc. I am currently porting it to asm with a bunch of new stuff. Oh yeah whoever made the hi-lo sprite thingy that is the bomb

is anybody really surprised?

Were the words "shock," "surprise," or "flabbergasted" even _mentioned_ in that news item? :)

--BlueCalx

Nope... with that much ROM, I don't think TI would be able to close every loophole.

But then again, it's TI - they probably couldn't even close all the loopholes in 30KB, let alone 2MB of ROM. Hence the development of ZShell.

I would be surprised. Now, HW2 owners can test pipeline and Zelda89 under ams2.04 . And I know many other old games would work if a good shell is released.
I tested these games on my HW1 and they worked, I tried solar stricker and it works if levels are not archived. Etc.

TI are idiots. They'll probably never be able to release the SDK because they're too big of dumbasses to be able to make it unhackable like they are undoubtedly trying to do, and they're too big of jackasses to just release the damn thing already because there is no way to make it unhackable to us, WE PROGRAMMERS KICK ASS!

I'm sure that TI programmers could fix every loophole in the flash protection if they really wanted to. They are professional programmers. They can't be that dumb. (But as for TI as a company, you may be right.) They most likely don't want or feel the need to spend time fixing it. It's often good to have a back door on your products (but then again they can make any rom they want...). Perhaps their use of c makes it so they can't find all the loopholes easily (but then again they most likely use asm for the flash protection...). I'm just guessing here; there may be better reasons. I just don't see how a professional programmer could be that dumb unless they are put under way too much time pressure.

>time pressure
yeah, that's why they dated their news,about ams2.04, as if it was released in 11/may

If you noticed, the date on their site matches the date in the AMS itself... As far as I can tell, TI hasn't been misdating their site; they're just using the dates their software was actually finished.

I said "released" not "finished".

"Professionnal programmer" doesn't have anything of significant. You are not a great programmer because you are "professionnal". I personally became a "professional programmer" one year ago, and it didn't make me program better than before...

After releasing new HW2 patch, I expect that releasing of SDK will be prolonged again. I think that they want AMS where everything will be under their full control before releasing the SDK.

But, who really wants their SDK? You want an emulator? We have VTI (although it is full of bugs). You want an assembler? We have enough good assemblers. C compiler? We have TI-GCC, TIGCCLIB and TIGCC IDE. Documentation? What do you expect in the documentation? Info about making games? Grayscale tricks? No. Their documentation will document TIOS routines, of course. I already documented about half of them. And, as I can see, nobody uses even 20% of what I documented. Nobody yet used any more complex TIOS function (like symbolic math functions, event driven routines etc.) in their programs so far. And, it will remain true even after TI releases its documentation ;-) I receive about 15-20 messages daily about TIGCC programming, but the most questions are about how to use sprites, grayscale, etc. Nearly nobody asked me how to use math, calculus, etc. Our ASM and C programmers are mostly game-makers, and SDK documentation will be for math-makers!

Next time, why don't we hold the HW2Patch secretly, until the SDK is released, so TI can't disassemble the program. Then eventually, they'd be forced to release the SDK, and after that we can release the HW2Patch later?

The comment on holding the HW patch secret from TI made me laugh. That is a good idea. However they could update their sdk. I think TI needs to ask good ASM programmers like Rusty and Xaxavoir (or however you spell that guys name, Doorsos creator) what we really need for our calculators. I bet they could TRIPLE their sales of calculators if they really improved them. But no they are big idiots. By the way, that professional programmer thing, I'm very young, I work for a company called salford-systems as a programmer, does that make me a pro?

I don't think that programmers only make games.
When more symbolic maths infos will be released, and when every one will know that yes, they can do maths in C, maybe we will have some fast maths programs written in C.

Personally, it interests me, and I'll maybe do some (if I have time, of course, which is very restrictive condition :-) )

What great news! It seems whenever TI tries to block us from using games(ANY IDEA WHY??) We always over come the obstacles.(Whoops) We need a slogan here at TIcalc.org...How about "We shall overcome!"? When TI people see that, they will tremble with fear. Then they will see it is futile to stop us and release source, not make any more asm limits...etc.

By the way, if a rom is made by us programers(See previous news article) What shall we call it?
It needs a name... Like anti-TIOS, or ATiOS just like that, with the i lower case. Or -TIOS(negative tios)
How about just make an OS Flash app? Using the current tios, we could just make a flash app that when run, would do ???(Insert something good here IE run games w/o crashing,all hw/ams support(above 2.03 because that is the lowest with flash apps))

I cant wait to see what this new wave of 68k programming brings us. It will surely pave the way for many new and exciting games and applications.

The 24K limit was a really strange choice to begin with. Just consider what that does and does not allow; it will hinder complex math programs, but not games!

Even though some games out there are larger than 24K, they include things like graphics, maps, text, and other data. I doubt that many (if any at all) games for the calculators are actually complex enough that the code itself exceeds 24K. So, even if there were an unbreakable 24K hardware limit, all this data could just be moved in a separate file; games would run fine as long as the code fit in the 24K space, which would hold a lot of machine code.

But, think about sophisticated math programs; they would need very complex algorithms for symbolic manipulation and such, so their code could easily exceed 24K. Of course, I'm talking about serious math programs, not the "Quadratic Formula" stuff.

That's because everyone is missing the point here - Ti is NOT trying to stop us from running games! But they ARE gearing up toward releasing that SDK and allowing professional application development; what they fear is people writing programs to convert apps to normal ASM programs are running them via RAM. And 24 would do just that - allow games, but limit _complex math programs_ like Flash apps!

It should also be noted that the write to ROM bug on HW2 calcs appears to be a mere software flaw (or many of them). If TI keeps trying, they'll probably be able to fix it sooner or later. . .

we could make TI's finance program in BASIC no less, save the purty UI it has (or will have, rather)...

TI really needs to make some better flash apps that are free; maybe something that derives step by step (although that too has been done in BASIC...)

only derivatives ? something that makes every calculation in step by step !! ah..mmmm ,but it seems more to be something released as a plug in or new ams, not flash app...

Do you mean that the message
"memory violation"
is because the game used more than 24kb of non-data code ?
If I didn't forget, that's the message I got testing Sft2 under Ams2.04 with unios.

I have no idea whether that problem has to do with the 24K limit, but even if it did, that would not mean that it necessarily had more than 24K of code.

The hardware protection only stops execution outside a certain range, so it would prevent running code more than 24K past the start of the program. But, code and data can and often are mixed in a program. Maximizing games potential as I described in my previous post would only work if you made sure that all code was together.

No........the memory violation error is not because of the 24k barrier, its because the program used up all available ram in its calculations and loading different things. It's in your manual............look it up.

Note that we can execute arbitrary long programs in RAM even without HW2 patch, and TI has not any methods to prevent us to do this, except it they released HW3 (because their protection device is "buggy"). Everybody who knows about "ghost RAM space" and "+256K trick" will understand what I am talking about...

Note: sma code is ~25kb + genlib code ~10kb + other libs ~2kb = ~37kb of code.

>>What shall we call it?
It needs a name... Like anti-TIOS, or ATiOS just like that, with the i lower case. Or -TIOS(negative tios)
<<

i like Tinix [T-I-nicks] (play on linix) it has a nice ring to it i think.

eggo

There already is a program named Tinux out there.

a slogan, or maybe a song:

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Stand up for your rights !
Get up Stand up
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