Wow! A news item this late? Well, perhaps not too late in Arizona. Anyway, perhaps someday I will get a TI-89, or maybe Voyage 200, and then I could make good use of them.

Also, happy Valentine's Day! How did you all do on the AMC contests?

Someday... I'd like to get one too.

TI also makes a lot of APPS for the TI-89. Of course, there's also some good ones for the TI-83+se.

But they all cost money or are useless for me!

What about the Study Card APP? That's pretty handy.

yeah, for storing notes and cheating =p

A plain text file could do that, in fact, you could even do that on a TI-82, just in a blank program.

I have always wondered how exactly Kerno works with the crash protection - does it run the program line by line looking for illegal calls, memory usage, etc.?

Good question. I think it does not, because that would slow programs down too much.

My guess would be that it is an interrupt, waiting for a specific keypress. When that key is pressed it clears the stack and returns to the OS. But that wouldn't keep program's from screwing up your memory...

Again: good question. Who knows the answer?

It puts it's crash handler address into the processor's crash vectors, so KerNO's code is only called when the processor encounters an error. You can use the same approach if you want to make your own crash-handling routine in your programs. (See the Motorola docs for more info.)

Would that be possible on a Z80 processor? How?

Probably.; No clue.

No way.

Does the z80 have interupts dedicated to error control? As far as I no it does not have a whole lot. The 68k does.

I doubt it, but it would sure be handy for buggy games.

Like mine.

It doesn't have crash vectors (as far as I know), so no...

Too bad. It would have been usefull for saving my data about twice a week... :)

Yeah, pretty much all you can do is install an interrupt handler that waits for some key and exits the program. Some shells do this. But programs that install their own interrupts (e.g. for grayscale) will disable the crash-protection interrupt handler. And even then, no crash protection will stop a program from corrupting the entire RAM. I've had a lot of ASM programs do that plenty of times.

You don' know what you are missing, not having an 89. I plan on getting a 92+, Much coller with the bigger screen.

My mistake, that would be cooler.

I don't know, the TI-89 is allowed on SAT's and all of those tests. The TI-92+ isn't because of the QWERTY keyboard, which makes it more of a mini "computer" The TI-89 is sweet for keeping hidden notes and stuff, though. I keep all my classmate's usernames and passwords and stuff in there.

I could be wrong, but doesn't the TI-89 have more games than the 92+? The big screen is probably easier to read text off of. Oh, one more thing, isn't the resolution, well, the LCD better on the TI-89? On the TI-82 it's blue on green... isn't the TI-92+ screen kind of like that, instead of black on white?

Thanks for the infomation. I had no idea the was the dingy color that I hate. And I figured that most of the games were the same. However, My friend has an 89, and it also has the bluish text with the greenish screen. But still thanks for the warning.

If you think the TI-89 is "blue on green", it is probably because you have never seen a TI-85 or a TI-92 (not the TI-92+ HW2, but the old TI-92, or the TI-92+ HW1 which is just a TI-92 with a Plus module).

so if I were to buy a 92+ to day, the helpful coment that no_one posted would not be true? that would be nice if he were wrong. Not that I don't like him, just i really had my heart set on a 92+, and would hate it if it was a bad decision.

You should just buy a Voyage 200, although I have no idea what the screen on it looks like.

personally, i like my v200 better than my 92 plus. The resolution on the 92 plus/v200 is the same as the 89. The screen (v200/92p) is bigger than the 89, and has more pixels, but the quality/resolution/sharpness is the same. The pixels on the display are BLACK and the background can be described as a very light gray.

-Greg

Alright, thanks. I didn't know how good the TI-92+ resolution was. Its resolution is better than the regular TI-92's resolution though, isn't it? I'm probably wrong again, but as long as someone knows, it's okay :)

>Its resolution is better than the regular TI-92's resolution though, isn't it?

The resolution isn't. The contrast is, though.

Err, that's what I meant. Sorry, I'm having a rough day ;-) I was talking about the "colors", the contrast... how it displays... I need extra sleep :)

Well, I'm pretty sure about the SAT part. Even so, I don't think it would be a bad calculator, even though the new v200 also might be something to look into. education.ti.com might have some information on this topic.

I had heard that about ACT/SAT, but I was not sure. And I never said that I was getting rid of my 89. That thing has been the best thing I own. I was devistated when I had to replace it with a new one. (you can only get HW2 calcs now.) I will have it unti the day I retire from my future job as an engineer.

>>How did you all do on the AMC contests?

Too bad I don't get to take those anymore (I'm in college now), but last year I got a 112.5.

What are AMC contests?

LOL, I just asked the same question :) Apparently, not all of us know what they are, hehe.

Go to the link above to see the AMC website. It's a math contest that many schools put on. I won in my school last year. My math teacher kinda forgot this year, so I have to take the B form.

Yay! A new news article! I was going to download KerNO a while back, but never got around to it. The article says it has anti-crash protection, which would be really nice. Is it made in C? Guess I'll download it and find out ;) (Hope I remember this time)

What's AMC? I feel dumb :)

don't feel dumb. I don't know what it is either

>The article says it has anti-crash protection, which would be really nice.
That's its main purpose.

>Is it made in C?
No, it is written in assembly.

Well, it's a good thing that people still know 68k ASM. It's a really tough, imo.

it's really easy, imh.

It might be easy, but C is much more intuitive. the commands are self-explainatory. (should that be hyphenated?)

You did it right, but, FYI, it is spelled self-explanatory. There is no "i".

:) are you saying that movemem is easier to remember than move or movem ;)

ASM is fun!

-Greg

It doesn't seem so, since you got it wrong. :-)
It's memmove, not movemem. :-)

Maybe it's a good thing I didn't try to learn 68k that much. I'd just embarrass myself ;-)

hrm, well, i guess its been awhile since i last used memmove in C :)

-Greg

I never used it at all... does it literally move memory? If it's really so popular, maybe I should look into it some.

Really? I think it's kind of hard. Maybe that's because I didn't spend as much time with it as I did with z80. z80 wasn't too bad. It just took a while to get the hang of how the syntax worked and everything. The 68k was really different than z80, which scared me away from it a bit. It's probably because it seems like it has more commands (move.w... wtf?)

As far as assembly languages go 68k is the easiest to learn I have ever encountered. It is much harder for a newbie to pick up assembly for accumulator based processors than it is for the 68k, where all data registers can be used equally and all adress registers can be used equally, except for the stack pointer.

Also simple register/variable management is less likely to bite a newbie in 68k asm than with z80.

Really? It's not that hard? I guess I just think z80 is easier because I spent a lot of time reading the tutorials over and over. I skimmed through the 68k one once. But, with C and all as a subsitute, I never really found the need for 68k asm, even know the programs would be smaller.

68k would be useful to know for TSR's and such, but I never been able to find a tutorial for 68k, much less to be able to program an app. I was going to do a shell like the MirageOS for the 83+, but cannot fing a tutorial anywhere. I don't know what to do.

TSRs can be made in C. goto Greg Dietsche's site. I think he has tutorials on TSR's in C

I don't think most people have a good idea of size comparisons between asm and c code.

Here is one example:

if(*ptr == MUL_TAG) ptr--;

the assembly version of this one line will be 2 or 6 byte smaller than the c code. It depends on the size of branches use. tigcc will code this with two branches. in asm i would code it with one simple branch just to skip the subtraction.


-Samuel