Yup, seems there's a new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition coming soon with a color screen akin to the Casio Prizm and the Nspire CX. This morning, Cemetech member 0rac343 leaked the first known picture of the new calculator, saying his school got 2 full sets (24 calcs) to test it out. Outside the color screen, not much has changed in terms of functionality, it runs the latest Mathprint OS. Not much else is known, like app compatibility, if the programs written for older versions of the 83+ series will work correctly, if the z80 processor stayed the same, if there's still ASM support, etc. The screen is believed to be 340x240, according to Kerm Martian. A page on TI's website about it also have been discovered, confirming the news. Critor, who often get insider news directly from TI, also confirmed the news, saying it's not fake. He can't confirm anything else and points out those questions:

• hardware used (it might be a z80, but it might be a TI-Nspire CX/CM with a permanent TI-84 keypad, which would explain why the TI-84 emulator was removed on these Nspire models)
• compatibility with current z80 applications
• compatibility with current z80 assembly programs
• is there going to be a TI-84 Plus C model ?
• is it going to be released in all countries when we allready have non-CAS TI-Nspire CX and TI-Nspire CM CAS with similar prices ?
• will we have to update TI-Connect and TiLP?

This is a pretty interesting move from TI, they likely wanted to offer a better competition to the Casio Prizm with CX-like functionality brought to their 83+ line, or to maybe even update their old outdated hardware with modern one. As I said, not much is known outside the fact it's a TI-84+SE with a color screen. We are eager to get more news about this, and we hope tons of new color games and utilities such as a color port of Reign of Legends 3 and color support in Axe will appear soon on Omnimaga

You probably didn't miss the big news : the discovery of a new TI-84 model : the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

Indeed, this impressive new born is surprising everyone, since it was believed that a colored future actually belonged to the Nspire series (with the CX, released in 2011).

But do you know the real story behind this discovery, which actually began ... a month ago !?

This model started its public appearance in an unusual way... :

• October 12th 2012 : someone called ''Ismael "seemathrun" Zamora'' posts a rather uncanny tweet : "@TICalculators can we see thecolor 84. please".
  
  
• October 18th, 6 days later : the official TICalculators account answers his question : "Hi Ismael, Thanks for your interest in the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. The product is not available at this time. If you'd like to receive an email notification when more info is available, please visit http://bit.ly/RXeD1n " (in 2 separate tweets because of the 140 chars max). TI thus confirms (by mistake?) the existence of previously unknown model, with its full name, as well as a link to their official site, poitning to a page where you can register your email adress to get updates on the model's availability.
  
  
• This reply-tweet apparently went unnoticed despite TICalculators' 3500+ followers. Only TICalc.org's account noticed the message and retweeted it, but then again, this retweet managed to remain unseen from the community.
  
  
• November 8th, the "leak" : a member of the Cemetech community, 0rac343, creates a topic in which he says that his class (high school) is a pilot class chosen by TI to test a new model TI-84 which will be released in the "next spring" (2013) : The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, posting at the same time a photo of it, he took himself, probably without permission.
  
  
• The largest TI community websites worldwidly relay the new and everybody starts wondering about technical and general features... (TI-Planet, Omnimaga...)
  
  
• TI was contacted multiple times by several communities but apparently didn't reply (yet) as they don't want to comment on the leak.
  
  
• Novembre 9th, TechPoweredMath writes an article about it, which got read and cited as source by much bigger tech news websites, mostly on Novembre 10th, like ArsTechnica, itself linked by NBCNews, Engadget...

 
 
 
Impressive, right ?

More info on tiplanet's wiki :  http://tiplanet.org/wiki/index.php?title=TI-84_Plus_C_Silver_Edition#D.C3.A9couverte_du_mod.C3.A8le

Source : http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?lang=en&p=132106#p132106

Following the previous news, Adriweb on TI-Planet has managed to get more details from Texas Instruments about the upcoming TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition model, which might answer some of our questions. Here is what TI wrote:

Quote

TI has begun previewing the soon to be released TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition graphing calculator. This product will be available in the Spring of 2013. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition has all the functionality of the best-selling TI-84 Plus family of graphing calculators - now with color and TI Rechargeable Battery.

In addition to that, as he mentions here and here, Adriweb got confirmed that the calculator will feature a Z80 processor of the same family as the older TI-84 Plus series and that it will have compatibility with the older models.


So basically, here is what has been confirmed so far:
-Model name(TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition)
-Release date (Spring 2013)
-Z80 processor (same family as previous calcs, so most likely no eZ80)
-320x240 color, backlit display
-Native ASM support (there are Asm(), AsmComp() and AsmPrgm commands and an APPS key)
-Same rechargeable battery as the TI-Nspire CX
-At least some compatibility with the older 84+ models

More anwsers to the following questions should hopefully come soon, either from TI or from 0rac343
-How far will 84+ compatibility will go? Will old ASM programs run? Will Pxl-On/Off/Change() coordinates, 8xi files and other TI-BASIC graphics become messed up due to the different screen resolution?
-What is the processor speed? There is wide speculation about Z80 processors not being able to go beyond 25 MHz.
-How much RAM and Flash/archive memory is available for the user?
-How long will the battery last?
-Is there an I/O port or just USB?
-Can it run Crysis?
-Price

Hopefully more info should be available in the near future.

Source: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=10736

Here are some bad news about the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition from TechPoweredMath (thanks to Kerm for summing things up on Cemetech. There is also a calculator info page being built up there):


-Like what happens when running FX-9860G BASIC programs on a Casio PRIZM, TI-BASIC programs that uses Pixel-On/Off/Test functions will not display properly on the new calculator. This also means that programs using Line() will obviously look weird as well. We do not know what will happen with old 8xi files when sent to the new calculator. The good news, though, is that this will allow far more details in games (providing drawing commands aren't as slow as on the Casio PRIZM) and if a game only make use of Text() and Pxl() commands, they'll still look OK, even if no longer full-screen.

-Similarly to when the TI-83 Plus replaced the TI-83 calculator (now the TI-82 STATS) in 1999, all TI-83 Plus, 84 Plus and Silver Edition ASM programs and applications will not run at all on the new color models.


Although this is bad news in general, this is not the first time this happens in the calculator community, the most recent example being the redesigned FX-9860GII which now uses a PRIZM processor. On that calc, any ASM or C program that do not use the official SDK no longer run on new models. The TI-89 Titanium suffered from compatibility issues as well with older TI-89 programs. For the TI-89 Titanium, however, HW3Patch solved all those issues and almost no program needed to be ported.

In other words, when the new calculator comes out, the TI community will have a lot of porting work to do if they want old programs to run on it. That's unless, of course, a savior decides to create an emulator or shell that can run older programs in their old school resolution. One thing we should be glad, though, is that unlike the TI-Nspire, where TI has fought non-stop against Ndless, the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition will at least have native ASM support in the first place.

Today on #omnimaga, Vijfhoek has released some huge photos about the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.



You can count the screen pixels and you'll find out that it is 320x240 like on the TI-Nspire:


Another great information comes from the memory manager screen:

The free RAM space of 22792B seems normal, but...
Look at that free space of 3293KB for the archive memory! Yes, more than 3.2MB archive space, meaning more than twice the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition arvchive space (1.5MB)!
The 2MB TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Flash ROM chip has probably been increased here to at least 4MB.

Note that according to this menu, you can store images in your calculator. They are merged with screen captures (Pic0-9 variables).



Source with more images: http://imgur.com/a/GeDfG#H3DzV
Source for technical specifications: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=132299#p132299

As mentionned here and here, Texas Instruments has finally opened a new page on their website, announcing the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and confirming some informations about the new color screen calculator model: http://education.ti.com/calculators/products/US/ti-84c/ If you check the comparison chart, you will see that the calculator is confirmed to have 3.5 MB of archive, but 21 KB of RAM (3 KB fewer than the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, 5 KB fewer than the TI-82 STATS and 7 KB fewer than the TI-82). It also confirms the rechargeable battery, backlit 320x240 16-bit color screen, USB transfer, the compatibility with the TI-84 Plus (although Cemetech reports having been confirmed that old ASM programs, along with some TI-BASIC ones, will not work) and that people will most likely start to bug Runer112 or Quigibo for a TI-84PCSE port of Axe Parser. TI-Connect will also be updated for the new calculator and good news for Mac OS users: It will be updated for you too! There are also some pictures of the calculator there, like the one seen to the right. A FAQ is available on Texas Instruments website at the link above.

As reported on Cemetech and TI-Planet, TI has finally published screenshots of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition showing how the interface looks like, in native resolution, via their Classroom activities page. Until now, only camera pictures of the calculator screen showing the interface were available.

As you will see, you can change the color of graphs and stat plots, meaning that there is at least a minimum of colors possible in TI-BASIC (some games use graphs and plots for graphics)! We do not know yet if there will be any proper color commands for Output(), Disp, Text(), Pxl-On/Off/Change() and other graphical commands, though.



Also, the screen appears to show 26x10 text characters at once, as seen below in the Window options, so here is a fake mockup to the right showing what Illusiat 11 might look like on a 84 Plus C Silver Edition calculator:


On the home screen, between each line of text, there is a 6 pixels gap, except the line below what you input, which has a 7 pixels space. A dotted line separates new entries, though, so what is displayed with home screen commands might be different than what is seen in the Illusiat 11 mockup above (showing the game intro). If, for example, with Output() there is a 2 pixels gap between each line of text, then between 12 and 13 lines of text could be displayed, depending of the screen margin, or it could be done on the graph screen via the Text(-1 command, if still available. Also note that in the fake Illusiat 11 screenshot, the "G" letter was made-up, because it was not available in any of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition screenshots on their Classroom activities pages and Doc/PDF files, so it is subject to be way different on the real device.

Also, it seems that the graphics resolution is limited to a 265x165 pixels area of the screen:


The background color around the graph/image area appears to be changeable, though (as you can notice in the older picture to the right). Hopefully it is possible to change graphing to full screen via the MODE menu or using this area via ASM libraries.

Hopefully there are more news and discoveries soon!

Hi everyone,

Today, TI (finally) officially announced its new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, after its leak by the community, originally on Cemetech.

Quote

Texas Instruments Adds Color to Math and Science Learning with
New TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Graphing Calculator

DALLAS (January 2013) – Texas Instruments, the most trusted brand in graphing calculator technology, announces a colorful addition to the TI-84 family of graphing calculators—the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition graphing calculator, featuring full-color capabilities, a high-resolution, back-lit screen, rechargeable battery and updated operating system. 

The TI-84 Plus C graphing calculator is designed to include features that will improve math and science learning, such as the ability to import photos and overlay graphs to connect concepts to the real world.  The rechargeable battery reduces frequent battery replacement purchases.  This new product addition keeps the same key placement, navigation and menus as the TI-84 Plus family, so educators can transition while continuing to use their current classroom activities. The TI-84 Plus C graphing calculator is also permitted on standardized tests, including the SAT*, ACT*, PSAT*/NMSQT, AP*, Praxis. 
Melendy Lovett, president of Texas Instruments Education Technology, said “We are excited about this new addition to the TI-84 Plus product line and for the opportunity to bring this new technology to loyal educators who have relied on TI-84 products over the years to help them improve math and science teaching and learning.”   


TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Specifications and Features
•   Screen resolution: 140 DPI, 16-bit color
•   Screen size: 320x240 pixels (2.8” diagonal)
•   TI Rechargeable Battery
•   3.5 MB FLASH ROM memory for data archive and Apps storage
•   USB unit-to-unit cable included for communication with TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition
•   Supports TI Basic and ASM programming


Availability
The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition graphing calculator will be priced comparably to the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and will be available for purchase beginning in spring 2013. For information on availability, please visit http://education.ti.com/84c


For more information about Texas Instruments:
•   http://twitter.com/TICalculators 
•   http://facebook.com/TICalculators 
•   http://youtube.com/user/TexasInstrumentsCalc
•   http://education.ti.com 


About Texas Instruments
Education Technology, a business of Texas Instruments, provides a wide range of tools connecting the classroom experience with real-world applications, helping students and teachers to explore mathematics and science interactively. TI’s products and services are tested vigorously against recognized third-party research, which shows that the effective use of graphing calculators improves the mathematical skills of students and their attitudes toward mathematics. For more information, visit http://www.education.ti.com.

Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN) helps customers solve problems and develop new electronics that make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. A global semiconductor company, TI innovates through manufacturing, design and sales operations in more than 30 countries. For more information, visit http://www.ti.com.


*AP and SAT are registered trademarks of the College Board. PSAT/NMSQT is a registered trademark of the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation. ACT is a registered trademark of ACT, Inc. Praxis is a trademark of the Educational Testing Service. None was involved in the production of nor endorses TI products. Policies are subject to change. Visit http://www.collegeboard.com and http://www.act.org.

Let's note that an official PDF was made available on Underwood Distributing, comparing the 84+CSE and the 84+SE. As well as another PDF about its features.



Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11132&lang=en

After the official press release earlier today, TI website has now been updated for the TI-84 Plus C SE.



We can see on their new page (http://education.ti.com/en/us/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-84-plus-c-silver-edition), much more details than in the press release:

Screenshots of the calculator itself while graphing stuff, and it's much better in color than on the previous B&W models...

Exclusive image combining the "school property" model and for the first time in public, the TI-Smartview 4.0 software, with a 84C emulator :

Other images with the new TI-SmartView 4.0 and the new TI-Connect 4.0 :

We can see details on the rechargeable battery : 800 mAh, 2.96Wh, like the one in the TI-Nspire CM-C available in China:

The Kickstand (was already there) :

Screeshots of well-known apps of the 84+, now ported for the 84C :

Source : http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11140

A mysterious message has been posted on Cemetech earlier today, from "6i8kjy", in the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition update thread. The person has posted screenshots of what seems to be a TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition port of the game Pede, a Centipede clone originally released for the TI-86 in 1998

TI-86 version:


Here is how it looks like on a TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, with colored sprites:


According to Kerm, the user really appears to be the author of the original game, who has an e-mail address ending in @ti.com, according to the ticalc.org author page, implying that he works or worked for Texas Instruments. This might explain why he has managed to write an assembly game (or app) for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition before it even comes out (the people who got to try the calculator at school most likely never had close to enough time to even write a simple TI-84+CSE BASIC game).

This could possibly be the very first calculator game to ever come out for the new color screen calculator model by TI!

From webinar video-type conferences on Introduction to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Graphing Calculator by TI (the files are available here), we could get more previews of how the TI-SmartView emulator for the new color screen model looks like. At the same time, while graphing and lists were demonstrated, we could learn about a few new features and get screen captures!


-Assuming the emulator is running at the exact same speed as the real calculator, this means that the speed for graphing and display in general is pretty similar with the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus, probably between both.


-Graph lines colors can be changed (through 16 different colors), and like on the 83+, you can change the line type (thick, dotted, etc).


-The background color inside and outside graphs can be changed for graphics, with the possibility to use background images as well (although they appear pixelated it seems, unless the pre-loaded ones are just small to begin with). You can even load custom images on your calculator, but only in the Archive.



-GridOff can be set to GridDot or GridLine and its color can be changed.

-Border colors can be changed.


-Stat plots now features 4 types of mark: The classic square, the cross, the dot, but now there is a 2x2 dot as well and of course you can change the colors. For those who use Stat plots to generate graphics in their games, 3 of them can be used at once so this can be handy.

-Fractions in the list editor shows in fraction/MathPrint mode rather than decimals (assuming MathPrint is enabled).

-You get an error? Catalog Help now shows up below error messages!


-MathPrint can still be disabled! (But will there be a speed gain like on the 84+?)


-The calculator cannot run Crysis.

-The yellow thing you see in the screenshot below is the new Busy/Run indicator.


-Both the USB and SilverLink cables will still work with TI-Connect.

-The calculator can be charged via USB.

If some of the graph format options can be changed via TI-BASIC programs as well like we could do on the 83+, this will give many possibilities for games! I would like to thanks Adriweb for notifying me about the webinar 84 Plus C Silver Edition showcase. He also posted several images of the webinar at TI-Planet. Also thanks to Calc84maniac for extra screenshots posted in this news topic!

Also, a few days before this conference, we have learned a few extra things in recent days as well!

-First of all, the color commands can be used while drawing, as seen in this picture from TI's Facebook page:


-Also, on Cemetech, a TI employee posted a screen capture of the Self-test screen, indicating that the calculator runs OS 4.0 with Boot code 4.0!


This is a lot of info added up on what we already know. So far, we knew that the calculator had a 320x240 color LCD like the TI-Nspire CX, 21.7 KB of RAM, 3 MB of Flash, color graphing, a rechargeable battery, ASM support, TI-BASIC and speed being between the TI-83+ and TI-84+. We also knew that it was compatible with older TI-83 Plus series models, but that ASM and TI-BASIC programs would need modifications to run on the new device (although TI-BASIC programs only using Disp/Output would have been fine in general).

Hopefully more information about the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and its OS will come out soon!

Tonight, TI-Planet has posted a lot of new pictures of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, as Critor obtained one from TI to try it. He took several pictures as he handled and tested it, allowing more interesting discoveries, particularly on the TI-BASIC programming side!

First of all, however, let's start by showing how this new machine look like from the outside (and what is that light on the calc side in the 3rd pic?)...


...and now the inside!


Hopefully our hardware experts in the community can enlighten us more on what the above contains and if there are any bizzare things in there. However, for now we will focus on the high-level programming portion of this invasion of new images!

The calculator now includes extra commands for the use of colors, while of course requiring some adjustments for ones made for older models due to smaller resolution and lower RAM. The colors appears to offer much more freedom than on the Casio CFX-9850G and FX-cg10/20 series. Since all that was posted at the time of this news post were pictures, we could not discover the speed of Line(), Pixel-On/Off/Change() and Text() commands and thus, were unable to know how they compare with the Casio PRIZM (on which they are atrociously slow), the TI-83 Plus and the TI-84 Plus. We also could not see if Pxl-Test() still exists, if the undocumented Text(-1,X,Y,Str) and Circle(X,Y,R,ComplexList) tricks still worked and if community tricks like Text sprites and dual-layer ASCII will still work.

The great news for TI-BASIC programmers is that colors can finally be used inside programs as well, not just via the DRAW tools on the graph screen!


At first, I was disappointed to see that the calculator has a token per color which were used with the new TextColor() command as argument. On this PRIZM this was the case too and this pose problem in TI-BASIC programming, because it forces you to use spaghetti or overly repetitive code in many cases, due to the inability to store the color inside a real variable. However, as you see below, the variable K is used as the argument in another program, meaning that it is possible to use colors more dynamically in TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition programs!


Basically, it seems that each color got its own ID too, as seen in the image below! The color IDs are as follow: Blue 10, Red 11, Black 12, Magenta 13, Green 14, Orange 15, Brown 16, Navy 17, LtBlue 18, Yellow 19, White 20, LtGray 21, MedGray 22, Gray 23, DarkGray 24


Of course, due to the larger screen, you will need to adapt your graphical programs and games, because everything might be out of place. Lines might be safe, but they'll not be as thick.


There also appears to be some loss in speed. Some people reported that graphing is 1.5 times slower than on a TI-84 Plus, but 1.5 times faster than on a TI-83 Plus. The following home screen program appears to run 4 times slower, but if it's due to screen updating, then it might not be as bad for programs that don't need to draw as often to the LCD:


For the ASM programmers who prefer to program using hexadecimal directly on the calculator, the calculator still includes Asm() and AsmComp(), but the AsmPrgm command was renamed to Asm84CPrgm:


In addition to that, as seen in the previous news, the background pictures, which appears to be 21 KB in size on the calculator, appears to be pixelated and scaled up by 200%. We do not know if this is the case on the calculator or if it's due to SmartView emulation, but this might compromise their use for complex title screens and graphics. On the other hand, we have yet to discover if regular pictures can still be created, if they take the entire graphing resolution instead of being scaled up and if they are much smaller. Also we have to remember that the calculator only has 21.6 KB of RAM, meaning that a port of XCOPY to copy archived programs to RAM will be a must for large games.

While there are some downsides, the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition BASIC language definitively offers more freedom than its 84 Plus counterpart and we hope to see new Omnimaga programs using its full potential in the future!

TI-Planet news can be found here:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11266&lang=en
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11268&lang=en

Definitively, those who will use pictures in their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition will have to make the most out of them. On a TI-83/84 Plus, a 8xi file is 767 bytes (1-bit). The 84+CSE equivalent will be 21956 (4-bit)! :X

Unlike picture files made directly on the Casio PRIZM using the drawing commands, their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition counterparts use no compression. On the PRIZM, pictures with very few details will generally take around 2 KB of RAM and take almost the entire screen, with 8 colors supported, while more complex ones will be larger. However, on the new TI color calculator, even if your picture only has 1 pixel in it, it will still take close to 22 KB of memory no matter what.

The good news, though, is that they can be recalled directly from the archive (we hope that the RecallPic command can still be used inside BASIC programs). This is why I am now bringing up the Pxl-Test() command. In Illusiat series, some RPGs used pictures to store map data. Now that pictures can be recalled directly from the archive on the new calc, this gives you even more freedom for data storage if you're creative enough! Although, according to Adriweb, it still returns 1 for any pixel turned ON regardless of the color, it is now easier to store game data such as RPG monster HP, Exp, etc, then recall the picture directly from archive when you need to convert that data into temporary lists and it is up to you to choose how will that data look like in your picture. Here is an example below:




Basically, in the TI-83 Plus title screen above, the enemy data is stored inside the upper-left half of the frame (including the left-most border), then mirrored on the other sides to make sure that it looks somewhat nice. On that calculator, this required constantly unarchiving the picture if you were low on RAM, resulting in several GarbageCollect messages, something that should no longer be a problem on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, should RecallPic still work from inside programs.

Such technique was apparently tried before on older models by TI-BASIC programmers and Calc84maniac brought it up last night on IRC. This would basically allow a BASIC programmer to keep almost his entire game data archived for the whole gameplay! Discussion about it happened here.


Besides pictures information, we have learned about the other drawing commands too. Some have been enhanced as follow:

Quote

Line(X1,Y1,X2,Y2,erase#,color#,linestyle#
Horizontal y,color#,linestyle#
Vertical x,color#,linestyle#
Tangent(expression,value,color#,linestyle#
DrawF expression,color#
Shade(lowerfunc,upperfunc,Xleft,Xright,pattern,patres,color#
DrawInv expression,color#
Circle(X,Y,radius,color#,linestyle#
Pt-On(x,y,mark,color#
Pt-Chg(x,y,color#

There appears to be 2 line styles (default being 2 pixels thick lines), but according to this, there appears to be even more, as if graph lines styles could now be used with drawing commands, to a certain extent. For example, LineStyle #4 used with Horizontal appears to show a diagonal lines pattern below the line. Could any of this makes filling the screen and drawing patterns faster?

As for Text(), the Text(-1,Y,X,String) trick still appears to work, so both small and large fonts can be used on the graph screen. It appears that the Circle(X,Y,R,{i}) trick (to display circles 3 times faster) either stopped working or its syntax changed, though.

Due to the larger screen, to keep the window settings consistent with each pixel, they now need to be set to 0->Xmin:264->Xmax:-164->Ymin:0->Ymax instead of 0->Xmin:94->Xmax:-62->Ymin:0->Ymax.

On the home screen you can now display 10 rows of 26 characters instead of 16 rows of 8 and on the graph screen you can display 13 lines of small fonts text. Fonts are now 16x12 pixels large instead of 8x6 and small fonts are 12 pixels high instead of 6. It is unclear if the dual-layer ASCII trick (as seen in Metroid Pi, Serenity and Zoith) still works, though, let alone text sprites. From 2007 to 2010, dual-layer ASCII sprites were pretty popular in the community due to their speed. Some tools such as this were even written to generate good combinations:




Now for the hardware, it appears that the calculator might feature a 128 KB RAM chip and a 15 MHz processor like the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition and the older TI-84 Plus models (hardware revision G or older) and a 4 MB Flash chip.

Quote

As supposed, the Flash ROM memory is a MX29LV320ETTI-70G from MXIO, with a capacity of 4MB !
Once the OS installed, 3.5MB of archive memory is coherent. The size of the OS would be similar to the 84+'s one.
We have already met this manufacturer recently with the external Flash-NOR chip in the prototype TI-Nspire Color.

But the most important with a historical evolution, it's the ASIC, the chip that contains the processor and the RAM!

Nothing comes to mind ?
Let's clean its surface:

The ASIC chip is TI-REF 84PLUSB/TA3! 

We are talking about the 4x36 ping ASIC chip that equips the TI-84 Plus with HW rev. G and below, as explained in a previous news, and that featured 128KB of RAM!
On the TI-84 Plus with HW rev. H and later, which is the majority of them right now and those on the 84 Pocket, TI used an ASIC called TI-84PLCR/TA1, smaller with 4x25 pins, but which only featured 48KB of RAM.

Even if it hasn't been tested yet, we can bet on having 128KB of RAM for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, and a 15MHz z80 processor.

Having 128KB of RAM is a great news for resources-hungry apps developers (which will be even more with the color....)

As with the previous news, there are some disappointments, but the new features makes the calculator look like a promising development platform!

Source: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11274&lang=en
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11275&p=135820#p135820
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11268

TI-Planet has posted more info on the colors that are available in TI-BASIC for the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. First of all, here is how each color will look like:




There are supposed to be 16 colors, but one is missing. In fact, the missing color is for transparency, allowing background images (which features 65536 colors) to still show up behind what you are drawing.

On the TI-83 Plus, when you store a picture then recall it, the white areas acts as a transparent color (in monochrome calculators case, the OR logic). However, that transparent color is no longer associated to white on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. However, as you will notice above, when you display text, a white background appears behind. If, somehow, that white background happens to be actual white and not the transparent color erasing what was displayed on the screen, could this mean the end of dual-layer ASCII?



On the other hand, however, this means that background images might be useable as backgrounds or textures for game graphics (such as the floor or the sky). Also, apparently, the text background might be changeable via Z80 assembly, meaning that if someone was to write an assembly librarie for TI-BASIC programmers, this would give them more freedom.

Another bad news is how the border color on the graph screen has a different color pallette. While you can still use light gray and white on it, the only two other colors that can be used are aqua and light green:



So no lightning bolt flash animation (such as for magic spells in an RPG).

Also, while every drawing/text command will be able to use the 15 colors on the graph screen, the home screen will remain monochrome.

Source: TI-Planet news

Community members critor and KermM have received preview units of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. So, over the weekend (and all of today, for KermM), BrandonW, calc84, critor, DrDnar, and KermM been working to get simple assembly programs running on the TI-84+CSE. We made significant progress, and have discovered the following:

• The ASIC is exactly the same as the TA3 ASIC on the TI-84+/SE, where port 15h reads 45h.
• Consequently, the CPU speed is still 6/15 MHz.
• There is (again) 128 KB of RAM.
• The TA3 ASIC has always supported 4 MB of flash. It's accessed by writing to ports 0E and 0F. (There's a mystery solved.) There might be support for 8 MB chips, too, but TI seems unlikely to release a such a calculator.
• The screen controller is an ILI9325 or equivalent (http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/ILI9325.pdf) and is permanently attached to the screen unit.
• Graph screen background images are 16-bit color, uncompressed, but are scaled up 2x for display; the actual data size is 133x83.
• The pixels are likely non-square: the old resolution is 96x64---a 3:2 ratio---and the new one is 320x240, which 4:3. So, the pixels will likely be about 9:8, or 1.125.

    The UI feels a little bit sluggish; indeed, simple calculations suggest that this is because the 15 MHz Z80 is just not fast enough to drive such a large display. Adding a faster CPU mode like 20 or 25 MHz (like the TI-83+SE was originally intended to support) would go a long way toward making the UI feel more responsive. Alternatively, a lower-resolution display, automatic 2x or 3x scaling, or a palette-based or grayscale 8- or 4-bit color mode would also do the trick, or perhaps TI could even switch to the fully-pipelined eZ80.

More technically, the controller only accepts 16- or 18-bit color, meaning 2 to 3 writes per pixel. Outputting a single pixel takes at least 29 clock cycles (for filling the screen with a single color). By contrast, the old controller needed about 100 clock cycles per write, but each write could send 8 pixels, so each pixel only averaged 12 clock cycles. So it takes three times as long to write a single pixel (if you want actual graphics), and the screen has 12.5 times as many pixels. The old controller can accept 120 96x64 frames per second (but it only displays at 60 fps); the new one, displaying only a shrunken 96x64 subsection, can only manage 60 fps. So, the maximum frame rate for full-screen display is 7 fps (0.15 sec/frame), and that's only possible if you're filling the screen with a single color. In practice, 5-6 fps (about 0.2 s/f) is the best you can possibly get for full screen graphics.

Critor ran a CPU test program that DrDnar wrote, which was the first program to produce screen output, and the first to produce troll output:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/gallery/image.php?album_id=144&image_id=2100&view=no_count

KermM is already working to add TI-84+CSE support to jsTIfied. Given that he has a head start and the only major changes are screen-related, he's likely to claim the honor of being the first to add emulator support; however, there is also word of competition from the TilEm team.

Since that is 52 tiles to update per frame, would such game run at 23 FPS or would the z-adress value change slow things down considerably?