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| Submitted By: DJ Omnimaga Date: May 02, 2011, 12:59:16 am Views: 2082 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 April 2011 Volume 1, Issue 4 Announcement Welcome to the April edition of the CGPN! With most of the people participating in it being busy and the smaller amount of different community things happening this month as people gets ready for school exams, this newsletter will be shorter than the others, but hopefully after everyone becomes less busy, there will be a lot more calculator development going on again. That said, it's not like there was no calculator development in the last month. In fact there were a lot, which shows the TI community is still going strong! Notable releases for April 2011
TI-Boy SE Beta! Here's the moment we've all been waiting for the past 2 years (if you have a TI-84 Plus): a beta version of TI-Boy, compatible with newer calculators that misses some extra RAM pages has been released! This means that even if you have a newer calculator (without the extra 80 or so RAM pages), you can still play GameBoy classics with astounding graphics, as long as you have any TI-84 Plus or TI-84 Plus Silver Edition! Go and play! TI-Nspire OS 3.0 Released, with a dangerous bug! This month, TI has finally released the well-awaited OS 3.0 for the TI-Nspire. On the good side, the OS upgrade finally brings 3D Graphing and Differential Equation Graphing to the Nspire. Unfortunately, this new Operating System has also brought a basket full of problems to surface. First, the new boot2 version 3.0 blocks downgrading to any lower OS, unless one has a RS232 cable to replace the version of boot2. Secondly, it seems that this new boot2 causes permanent damage to some calcs, preventing them from booting. Basically, unless you use TNOC to remove Boot2 from the OS prior installing it, it could actually destroy your calculator! As more than a dozen Nspire owners have reported, Nspire OS 3.0.1 has bricked customers' Nspires beyond repair. TI has removed the OS from its download page and announced that a new OS will be released next month, but until then, please do not install OS 3.0 unless you need to. If you need to update for any reason, you can use TNOC to remove the glitched boot2 from the OS before installing. Finally, many new bugs have been exposed in the computer algebra system of the Nspire CAS. Although TI has promised a new operating system next month, considering their past, it is doubtful that they will fix all of the bugs. Hopefully, fixes will come out soon! Lua on the Nspire! With the release of OS 3.0 for the Nspire, the community has made an exciting discovery: Lua on the Nspire! This new programming language is 9000 times better than the native BASIC language included with the operating system! Even though the discovery of the new language is new, an explosion of new game development has occurred. As of now, six games have been announced in the Lua language: 15 Puzzle, Block Dude, 9sweeper, Connect 4, nFighter, and a tunnel clone. The arrival of this language caused the TI-Nspire development scene, which was stagnating in the past 6 months, to pick up once again. We wish the developers of these games luck and we hope that this explosion of Nspire game development will continue! We also hope that the next versions of OS 3.0 will be less buggy and that TI will keep Lua compatibility intact despite the arrival of 3rd-party TI-Nspire Lua development. Online TI-Nspire Document Player Here's a pleasant surprise coming from Texas Instruments: they have put online a TI-Nspire Document player, capable of reading and displaying interactive TI-Nspire documents (.tns). You can see it in action playing Levak's Make3D in Lua, with an virtual keypad and everything! The Arrival of Casio PRIZM Games Casio PRIZM development is finally leading to game development. On Cemetech, Merthsoft has made Minesweeper and Conway's Game of Life clones in C and KermMartian started to port his TI-83 Plus online multiplayer Scorched Earth clone Obliterate to the FX-cg10/20 calculators! Backup in Multiple Locations Please! Following several data losses the past year and more recently, Hot_Dog's computer being stolen, the Omnimaga team urges everyone with active projects to backup frequently and in different places to prevent the loss of a project many people looked forward to. Every week or so, you don't have to do a full backup, but back up your most recent projects and copy it onto a flash drive or other backup location. Those who got two calculators should backup their work everyday on the other calculator if they worked a lot on their project. This ensures that people won't be disappointed by an involuntary death of a project. Also, make sure to avoid following the 42 steps to kill a project due to data losses while coding. Thank you and happy coding! iOmnom for Cell Phone Browsers Got a phone? Omnimaga admin Eeems has been working on a version of OmnomIRC for cell phones and other small screens: iOmnom! With a simple but effective UI, it makes every step of logging into IRC easy for phone users, from the minimalized login screen to the native-looking controls. You can even customize the number of lines displayed to suit your screen, and switch between #omnimaga and #omnimaga-fr on the Settings tab. It will also work on webkit-based browsers on computers. Discuss this project here! In addition to that, Netham45 has made an alternate version that works in more browsers too. It is located at http://www.omnimaga.org/iOmnom_Mini/ Credits Yunhua98 - CGPN founder Apcalc - Contributor Deep Thought - Contributor DJ O - Contributor All Omnimaga Coders of Tomorrow and Managers - Editing, Formatting, Ideas, and Support Miscellaneous If you have any submission ideas for next newsletters, feel free to PM yunhua98 on Omnimaga or Cemetech. He will forward them to the CGPN team in Omnimaga staff section. Direct link to this newsletter: http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=articles;sa=view;article=32 HTML format: http://www.omnimaga.org/newsletter/apr11.html Plain text format: http://www.omnimaga.org/newsletter/apr11.txt You can also subscribe to receive a copy of our newsletter via e-mail. When logged in on the forum, click Profile in the navigation bar, then in the sidebar click Notifications and Email and enable notifications from there. http://www.omnimaga.org |
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