So u have these games that use a "greyscale" but the game just makes the pixels from the screen go on and off really quickly, and i think that is it not so great for your screen...
so is it really bad? or is it just taboo?

Greyscale is not bad for the screen.
The things that are bad for the ti-84+ screen are:
 - blue lines of death (a.k.a. "test mode"): one or multiple blue horizontal lines on the screen. This can destroy the LCD if left on for too long (a minute or so), so pull a battery as fast as you can when this happens.
 - leaving it on for too long: as with all screens, leaving the LCD on for too long (here, too long means a day or more) with the same image on it will "burn it in", which basically means that some spots will be darker than others (even when the screen is turned off).
 - turning pixels on and off perfectly in sync with the display driver: while this is very uncommon, this can be damaging to your screen (not nearly as bad as blue lines of death, but it's still best to avoid). If this is happening, some pixels wil be lighter than normal white pixels, and others will be darker than black pixels. (EDIT: this)

The only issue is that they drain batteries twice faster, especially ASM games with nearly perfect grayscale.

Does grayscale really use more battery power? I thought that most games (running at the same CPU speed) drain the battery equally because most of them use 100% CPU (meaning they never put the processor in halt/low power mode).

- turning pixels on and off perfectly in sync with the display driver: while this is very uncommon, this can be damaging to your screen (not nearly as bad as blue lines of death, but it's still best to avoid). If this is happening, some pixels wil be lighter than normal white pixels, and others will be darker than black pixels.

What? (I'm confused as to how this is bad, maybe I don't understand what you were saying)

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 07, 2013, 04:45:04 pm

The only issue is that they drain batteries twice faster, especially ASM games with nearly perfect grayscale.

Does grayscale really use more battery power? I thought that most games (running at the same CPU speed) drain the battery equally because most of them use 100% CPU (meaning they never put the processor in halt/low power mode).

(This might be wrong) Grayscale does not use more power. You are right, considering most games don't halt the CPU, the power usage is directly proportional to the CPU speed and there are only 2 CPU speeds.


The reason grayscale doesn't damage the screen is because although to you it looks weird, to the LCD, nothing has changed. The screen is updated 60 times per second no matter what. This is done by the LCD driver which exists physically outside of the CPU. The LCD driver goes through the screen row by row and sets each pixel. That means that the driver is sending ON/OFF signals at around 4,000 signals per second. Simply changing whether or not the driver sends a 1 or a 0 between updates doesn't really change anything because it doesn't remember what it sent last go around. (By this logic, the most physically demanding operation for the driver would be a checkerboard.)

Now, if you actually want to damage the screen, instead of using grayscale, you use bluescale. This was a sort of horrible idea that we played around with for a little while but for the most part, a consensus was drawn to not use it because it actually did cause physical damage to the screen. Unlike grayscale which simply toggles the pixels (which the LCD is designed to do obviously which is why it doesn't cause damage) bluescale rapidly changed the contrast. This resulted in some pretty crazy stuff, but, running these programs for too long would permanently damage your screen.


Edit:
   Willrandship: has anyone tested that, I'm actually kind of interested now

Quote from: ben_g on November 07, 2013, 04:47:03 pm

- turning pixels on and off perfectly in sync with the display driver: while this is very uncommon, this can be damaging to your screen (not nearly as bad as blue lines of death, but it's still best to avoid). If this is happening, some pixels wil be lighter than normal white pixels, and others will be darker than black pixels.

What? (I'm confused as to how this is bad, maybe I don't understand what you were saying)
...

I meant what Runer said as the thing that looked interesting:

... However, flashing large areas of the screen on and off together near the LCD's refresh rate is not fine. It may look interesting, but don't do it.

Okay, so it's not problem as far as i can understand c:

btw, what are those "blue lines of death"?

People have used this mode in combination with changing contrast rapidly to generate bluescale That was really bad for calculators.

It results in some pretty crazy looking effects, though... iirc I have used it in one of my experimental, never released concept game things. Don't try it yourself tho unless you are willing to risk your screen (which you don't, judging from your initial question)
If anyone wants, I could make a little vid showing the effect