Yeah, I'm sorry about my response. I didn't have time to go into the details of answering your question, but I did notice the 16-cycle thing. I apologize if that came across somewhat rude.

Ok, so this is what I remember reading. It was not a DMCA, but it was pretty close. Of course I don't know the whole story (I was 9 when that was posted), so you'll have to get someone older to explain what really happened.

And since I had to go hand copy the link from my old computer, here is the topic that I've had favorited for over a year from which I figured out how to unlock flash. It's by floppusMaximus and you can see on page 2 how cautious everyone is getting. It's pretty vague on the details so it took me quite a while to figure out how to do it...

Haha, I remember those discussions (good old thread #240...)

I did eventually find a simpler and more robust version of the technique I was talking about in that second thread, but I don't know if I ever released that; it's SE-only, of course.  What I would currently recommend using is the technique used by DuckSign, which is based on Brandon's well-known exploit, but much more robust.

But...

It is dangerous to write to Flash.  It's not a matter to be approached lightly.  The Flash protection is sometimes annoying, but it's actually a very nice feature, because it means that you can run all kinds of assembly programs, with nearly unrestricted access to the hardware, without worrying that your data could be corrupted (or worse, your calculator made unbootable.)  Every time somebody writes a program to work around that protection - no matter how skillful or how careful the programmer - that creates new risks, makes users less safe.  If you can do what you want to do without writing to Flash, or only using the supported API - and, most of the time, you can! - we are all better off.  I'm not going to tell people what they can and can't do, but these are things you really need to consider before releasing such a program.

This is why I am glad I have an emulator That way if I ever dabble in writing to flash I can very thoroughly test it and recommend it not be used on an actual calc

Ooh, that actually makes me wonder if emulators should have a way for some programs to detect if it is an emulator... That way if it isn't, you could make your programs not execute certain code

Ooh, that actually makes me wonder if emulators should have a way for some programs to detect if it is an emulator... That way if it isn't, you could make your programs not execute certain code

Seems like that would be a bug in the emulator, don't you think?

(There are various seldom-used aspects of the hardware that most emulators don't properly handle; you could probably find one of those to exploit.  But don't be surprised if later emulators fix those holes.  One of my personal goals for TilEm 2 is to eliminate as many of them as possible.)

AH I remember that thread now. I joined Detacheds around late 2003 (I was Kévin9999 back then because there was another Kevin user and that was the nickname I normally used on forums). I didn't read the entire thread but I remember the discussions about third-party OSes and TI sending C&D letters.

I wonder if that was because back then they were selling APPs and they were scared that people would make it easy to pirate their stuff or steal their code?

Yeah, that was more along the lines I was thinking ! Of course all that would need to change is the addition of new ports and we could be set It could have the flash and whatnot unlocked and users could have fun with that

Well, yeah, that has to be our primary focus; in order to be useful for debugging, it needs to be as faithful as possible to the real hardware.  But, if people wanted to have a virtual calculator with 2 MB of RAM and a 100 MHz CPU, that would be easy enough to do, and maybe useful for some purposes.

Now this is a curosity question, since writing to flash is dangerous...does the routine work on all operating systems?

If you're talking about Brandon's write-to-user-Flash routine - yes, I think it works on all current operating systems.  Whether it'll work on future OSes, of course, is anybody's guess, but one of the things that bothers me about Brandon's routines is that they don't do any sanity checks to see whether the OS will work or not; they have no failure mode except to crash.