Survey posted 2000-11-28 03:13 by Andy Selle.

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The amount of time it loads depends on the size of the program. i made a program and it is 7000 ram and the program is a bit slow.

I heard that someone is making a sort of external hard drive for a calculator. Is this true? If so then for which calculator?

I don't think it would matter which calculator the external hard drive is for. in my thinking, all you'd need was a regular computer hard drive, some batteries, and a linking program for your calc, and there ya go: external hard drive... but that's just what i think.

the idea seems quite interesting, but how would one go from the thirtysomething- or fortysomething-pin eide cables to the 3-wire calculator linkport? that would be painfully slow if it was converted by a pic microcontroller or similar chip. usb would probably be easier (as i've stated far above), and there is much less wiring to deal with, as usb uses positive, negative, ground, and power wires. just make sure the peripheral is grounded to the calc beforehand, and you should be just fine, provided you (and/or someone else) create both an adapter and functional drivers, preferably for most/all of the linkable calcs.

a late thought in the game... what about 110% or more with compression techniques?

I personally think that TI just needs to make a better calculator. I'm pretty sure they could easily make one with color display, 50-100 mhz processor, 1gb hard drive(I know they make them plenty small that it would work), 1 mb of ram, built in speaker, faster link, etc... That would be awesome

sure. then they could get into the business of making small laptops, and then maybe some handheld supercomputers.

why not?

because if they made one's with color casings then all the dumb kids would but that one insted of the super-smal- no, wait... nevermind, it's been done.

ti already makes full-fledged laptops, and they don't want to compete with themselves.

I own a TI89 and what I can advice is to put everything in archive, especially with a HW calc. The advantage is twofold : if this crashes, you will get everything back and it seems that the free amount of ram improves the calc performances. THis is something to benchmark. And don't forget that grayscale games eat batteries dramatically : with 5 hours of solitaire, I killed them.

Anyway, in my calc I have :
- all my RAM free
- 50% games
- 50% maths / physics ...