I think this is a great idea. Most Ti owners seem to use there calculators to do 1 of 3 things (program, play games, do math and science work). It would be nice to have 3 seperate OS's optimized for each of these applications.

Could you explain what you mean when you say:

" I person dumped their 89 rom mistakenly and it still booted, but with no extra algebra and calculus stuff. "


1. What are you saying in that sencence?

2. Could you explain how the flash rom got erased?

3. What happened to the 89 after the rom was off?

4. What did the screen look like w/o the rom installed?

Could you please post the answers to those questions, I'd be much appreciative.

Thank You

I'm so sorry you did not understand. Let me clarify since I infered too much. On the TI89 assembly news group a person was experimenting, trying the built in assembly function, writing their own code, and damaged the rom (its not a true rom as I will explain). The TI89 has a base rom, and then has added software flash rom. What was dumped was the flash rom not the actually bios /os rom. The screen looked normal except the menu's were blank and the functions lost.

That is the most BS i have heard in a long time. It is possible for parts of the TIOS display to dissapear, (some times doorsos erases the line above the status area), but you cant erase parts of the ROM safely. The algebra CAS, all the stuff that came with your calculator, is one big thing. It is not a base and a add on!
Where did you come up with that crap, or who is this guy that it happened to? There supposedly is a glitch that lets you edit the ROM, but you wouldn't be able to just take the math parts out...(nice try though)

--KP--

In response to a lot of commits on the FLASH ROM I have decided to try to clear up any misconceptions people might have. The word FLASH stands for Fluxing Lepton Anomaly in a Space-time Hamiltonian. The ROM stands for Right Or Maybe memory, this is very different to the conventional on-off memory.
ROM memory stores data as a Right Or Maybe instead of right or wrong. It does this through a cleaver mechanism known as the Schrodinger’s cat phenomena. Little tiny box’s containing cats are used instead of switches. When data is stored to the little boxes containing these cats a harmful radioactive particle is sent to the box that has a 50% chance of killing the cat. Since the box is closed we don't know if the cat is dead or alive, hence a MAYBE has been stored in the box. To store a RIGHT (also know as ON, or 1) to a box the box is first opened and the radioactive particles are sent until the cat is dead. All the boxes that contained dead cats could only be rest back to when the cat was alive 7 times (because cats only have 7 lives). Since there was a need for a method of resting this type of memory more then 7 times, the FLASH technique was developed.
As all physics students know this FLASH reverse's the arrow of time within the given region of space. Therefore the cats can be brought back to a time when they had more lives. This process can raise the number of lives of a cat by a power of 4.75 ~ 10000 lives. So you can only write to the ROM 10000 times before all the cats are dead. I hope this clears things up a little.



I hope no ones takes this seriously :)

Texas Instruments kill cats? :(

Sure, but they're very small cats, due to the fact that they are required to fit so many inside the not-so-big case of your TI. Also, the LCD's (little cat diodes) involve cramming a few black cats into each little box to turn it black. Therefore, the cramming sequence is initiated when a "right" message is received from a radioactive catbox. They are are sometimes released when a "maybe" message is recieved, due to the maybe-ness of the signal.

I thought this little issue needed to be cleared up.

What TI does with the Cat's blood?

They sell it to Campbell's for their Tomato Soup.

I understand that that is (?) a joke, but it is the worst one that I had heard in my entire life (No offense!). I know that Schrodinger’s cat is a real concept, but I am having DOUBTS about "The word FLASH stands for Fluxing Lepton Anomaly in a Space-time Hamiltonian. The ROM stands for Right Or Maybe memory, this is very different to the conventional on-off memory." Could you clear thgis up?????

I'll get straight to the point: _Yes_, coding an entirely new OS would probably have no significant impact since a calc is primarily just what it is: a _calculator_. No matter how much this may be true, there is no real argument against any attempt to accomplish such a noble and utterly... _cool_ project. It is very challenging, in my humble opinion, to code from *scratch* a whole entire OS. Although not nearly as important or even demanded as Fargo was, a new OS would be just plain vanilla *whoo-hoo!!* =P; it'll even more so if the project became so popular that new programs can be built upon this brave new platform and whatnot. Hey, if you (the problem-solving, handy-dandy codemeister out there) feels up to the challenge, who are we to stop ya? =)

One major factor though: Why make a "MacOS for calcs"? Heh.. err if there was going to be a new OS for the calc, it should be totally utilitarian... command line okay? IMHO, GUIs suck. But that's another list... hehehe peace out. =)

I agree. GUIs do suck. Just look at Casio, they've gone overboard with the GUI and the color and all that crap. It's not even as good as a TI (no games :)!

I really don't see why a person would want to build a new OS with FlashROM. It's my understanding that you could simply write an assembly program or a number of them which would accomplish whatever features you're looking for. One could disable the interrupts and switch into supervisor mode, then one would have OS control. And, no degradation of the FlashROM. 10,000 would not be a lot if people were needed for beta testing. How many Linux kernels are there? Subtract 10,000 - the number of linux kernels and you're down a whole lot of FlashROM life.

All of the beta testing will not be happening on the same calculator

Ummm...you only use one kernel. At any rate, you'd only need to edit FlashROM once to install the whole OS.

Well, what about building OS for non-flash ROM calcs?

I am thinking a while about writing completely new ROM content for the TI-82. Why? I looked into 82, 83 and 85. TI-82 seems to have ROM separated so it can be easily de-soldered and replaced by Flash ROM (I can have a couple of really cheap 82's so I can experiment with them).

At the moment, we can write anything to it. It would be really fun to have something more interesting in this ROM. Evergreen games, apps and so.

Does it sound interesting for anybody except me?

Misogyn

I am interested in writing a new operating system. I'd still leave most of TI's stuff intact, just give it a nice GUI. Wouldn't it be nice to have a startup logo, too?

I am interested in writing a new operating system. I'd still leave most of TI's stuff intact, just give it a nice GUI. Wouldn't it be nice to have a startup logo, too? E-Mail me if anyone has any information concerning any of this.

Why WHY

Logo screens are evil :)
IMHO, GUIs are unnecessary (is there an echo in here?)
they take up valuable memory, while also reducing what you can do with your system
(usually)

With All this talk about messing with the inside of calculators why don't we such get a gameboy and change it into a calculator or a small computer since it has the same processer as the ti-89 i think or it could another one calculator