First Paragraph: Yes! Sweet!

Second Paragraph: No!

You will be missed, Eric!

I'm gonna miss you too! :(

Where I can read about new functions on the v2.08? Thanks.

Check the above link. Unfortunately, it's all in French.

1) Get Google Toolbar
2) Click Page Info
3) Select "Translate into English"

(Provides a *somewhat* readable translation)...

Does google toolbar work on Mozilla?
I may try it in a moment.

http://babel.altavista.com/tr

Yay! First time I submitted news and they actually posted it!

no, I submitted it!

No, it was me! OK not really; I just felt like adding that.

No! It was me and one of my soccer teammates invisible lepracon (this thing needs spell check) bob! Ok ok, so maybe it was just bob...

It was a group effort, then :) . I suppose if only one of us had submitted it they wouldn't have felt it was an important post.

or maybe they knew about it before anyone submitted...

Possible, but that soesn't seem likely, I emailed them approximately 1 hour after its release.

But what are the chances they checked their e-mail that quickly?

About time they changed it. granted, the news on my site barely ever gets updated too.

Awesome, I'm gonna check it out...

It was me who let ticalc know about it. You will be missed eric. What about my submission for the review staff? I sent it in twice!

Does anyone have ROMS for the TI-80 & 81?

For the TI-80 at least, only the viewscreed model had a link port, so I don't think that a rom is going to be very easy to come by.

BTW, why would you want such old roms?

It was a joke...

he's gone insane :-p
he's trying to port a new program he's making to EVERY possible calculator...

did the TI-80 and TI-81 even *have* a link port?? if not, this is kinda pointless

Goodbye, Eric. :(
Anyway, he wants to discover ASM on the 80, hehe. Could someone explain to me how the clock thing works? Like, how the old hardware can even be updated with a ROM flash to include this feature. Hope that makes sense, I'm confused and an idiot. And, BTW, in case anyone missed my parody, here it is. ;)


Programmers, freeloaders, the staff of the site, transferring countless megabytes. Nick B on the first of April shows us HP ads, his jokes are so bad.
This is for the people at ticalc.org, that help me shout PARADE!, and make me feel good.
This w00t!'s for you. And you and you and you. This w00t!'s for you. And you and you and you.
This w00t!'s for RCT, Nightrose, all the other great guys, Kirk Meyer, the good ol' chap makin' mean flash apps. Chickendude with his cool parentheses, no_one's more important than it might seem.
This is for the people at ticalc.org, that help me shout PARADE!, and make me feel good. This w00t!'s for you. And you and you and you. This w00t!'s for you.
Copyright 2002 Elijah McNeish. Adapted from a song which is Copyright Anhauser-Busch.

There's a special chip in the HW2, but not in HW1, that makes AutoInterrupt3 (ai3) run at EXACTLY 1 hz. So, you turn AI3 on and all it does is increment a variable. That variable is the number of seconds since January 1, 1997 (I believe). On HW1, ai3 isn't 1 hz.

So they had actually planned for this in advance? And what are the differences between the HW versions, and how does that affect assembly programs? Sorry about all my stupid questions, but I guess we all had to start somewhere. *Sheepish laugh*

Oh boy, that's a lot of stuff. Number one is the faster CPU (12 MHz vs. 10MHz). Next, GateArray Buffered LCD (on the HW1, there is a memory address that tells where the LCD data is stored. On HW2, there is a buffer that stores whatever is written to the screen and displays that). That makes Grayscale harder, b/c you have to manually copy 3840 bytes at every plane switch. Also, there are real protections against things such as size limits (on HW1, it's just software protection) and having the PC out of a certain range (again, on HW1 it's just software). These can be defeated, such as adding 0x40000 to the pc (the ghost space), or by Hw2patch. Oh yeah, and the clock thing, now, too.

Thank you for answering my questions (both of you, but I could only reply under one, hehe. This w00t!'s for both of you.) Sorry about all the posts that have been off-topic. So you're saying that HW2 is actually WORSE than HW1? Is a similar situation like this expected for the Voyage 200? Thank you.
-Elijah

>>So you're saying that HW2 is actually WORSE than >>HW1? Is a similar situation like this expected for >>the Voyage 200? Thank you
Well, in terms of the protections, yes, sort of. However, it does have the faster processer, the clock (whoopty doo), and because of the gate array buffered LCD, RAM accesses are like 30% faster. Now, the two problems:
1: Protections. 2 ways were found to bypass this. One is the ghost space (there is only 256k of RAM, from 0x0 to 0x3ffff, and the next 256k aren't used: 0x40000 to 0x7ffff, so any address in the range of 0x40000 to 0x7ffff is treated as if it's address were 0x40000 less, but no protections are activated on it). The other way is HW2 patch. I'm not sure how that works.
2: HW1 Grayscale. Scott Noveck found a way to make it work with a movem using almost all the registers available, which is the fastest way possible. Julien Muchembled found a way to syncronize the copying of the planes with the LCD refresh, leading to almost flicker-free grayscale.
The V200, while saying HW2 in the about screen, claims to be HW3 in the Hardware Paramaters Block (don't worry too much about that :). It's been tested, nothing too bad there, just a bug cropped up in the ttstart decompression routine.

I don't know how HW2patch works, but I do know this: When you install it in ROM, then run the self test and check the ROM (basecode), there is a checksum error where there once was none. I am assuming that this means that it changes the base code.

One of the evil things that TI added in HW2 was a protection chip that prevents the program counter from being in the 'ghost space', which is used to get around the 8/24k limit. The last few address pins are not soldered onto anything, so it simply wraps around. The AMS enforces the 8/24k limit in the physucal ram, but not in the wraparound (ghost) ram.
Another thing that they did was increase the clock speed from 10 to 12 mhz.
They also made it so that the display driver only monitors changes in display ram, instead of the actual ram's contents. This sounds like a minor difference (and it is), but it spells d-o-o-m for HW1 grayscale being in gray on HW2.
There are many other differences, but I don't have time or space.

Sadly, 2.08 doesn't work on VTI! Sob!

Uh... 2.08 DOES work in VTI... check out the image at
http://www.bugstew.net/screen.bmp

oops... thought mozilla crashed there... clicked it again...

Uh... 2.08 DOES work in VTI... check out the image at
http://www.bugstew.net/screen.bmp

It's not so much a chip as a crystal with a base frequency of 32.768 kHz. It has adjustable frequency too.

How do you change the frequency?
What does the crystal control?

I know that all computers store time in number of seconds from 1970 (so there'll be problems in 2034 when that number hits 2^16--only 16 bytes have been allocated for it so far, but that's another comment), but I don't know about TI calcs.

are you saying there could be like a Y2K thing for calculators?

an other thing...how does the clock continue to store time if all of the batteries are out? does it have an internal battery or something?

no batteries == no clock.

about your y2k for calcs: you will be dead before it happens with ams 2.08 i guarantee it.

values are stored as ULONGS's from a certain Jan 1, i forget the year (1992ish?)

The dates only seem to go up to 2100 though...I've planned to live at least that long :)

That would be 1997. As ULONG's (32 bits), that would give them 4294967295 seconds, which is about 136.102207751 years, so that give us until about 2133 until the calcs roll over, but that shouldn't cause any problems :)

yes I have gone insane, but I also have every rom (except for 73, 80 & 81, and V200. I would like to see how crappy it is.

click the link for 81 emulation software...

a ha, a joke... funny man...

I'm not a man... I am a dinosaur. A lickalotapus.

also theres an emulator in the dos section

I think that that emulator has similar **Functionality**, and is not actually an emulated z80 with the rom. Close for basic, but would not work at all for Assembly.

So? It's not like there are any assembly programs for the 80 or 81 (at least not in ticalc's archives).
Also, there is no link port, which makes it (almost?) impossible to get a rom dump (needed to figure out how to access assembly and to run a real emulation).