Is this a correct comparison?

[willrandship]

I was speculating about the Nspire, having found out that it uses an ARM chip. Since that is the case, comparison to other ARM devices should be fairly close, correct?

The point is, if they are truly in perspective to each other, the DS is significantly less powerful than the nspire. For instance:

Nspire has 150 MHz processor (according to ticalc.org) DS has two: 66Mhz and 33Mhz.
Nspire has 16MB of ram (not flash), DS has 4MB.

This means that almost anything that can run on DS (not touchscreen dependent) could run on the Nspire! For example: SnemulDS (SNES), A billion different NES emulators, and various other homebrew.

Also, since they are both ARM, could a call style setup like the one in TI-Boy for the 84 be used for GBA? I feel much more uncertain about this one, but it may be a possibility so I'll throw it out there.

Thanks in advance!

[meishe91]

Well Ndless finally came out for the nSpire not to long ago which allowed C programs to be run on it (I believe) and then calc84 (again, I believe) created a gbc emulator for it. I don't know a whole lot about nSpires because I don't own one, so I'm sorry I can't help much more than that.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Doesn't the DS have some sort of video card or chip to process graphics, though? We must not just take the processor and memory into account, but the entire hardware as well.

That said, the GBC emulator runs 6x faster than normal if you turn off speed throttling, and calc84 was still new to ARM assembly when he wrote it, meaning who knows if he won't discover any better optimizations.

Calc84 also did some 3D stuff. The polygons were not sorted but they supported 16 grays with dithering (meaning about 32 shades) and still had about 70 fps.

[Raylin]

Agreed.
You cannot just look at the processor and the memory when comparing a calculator to a console.
Graphic cards and other various hardware must be taken into account.

[willrandship]

From what I've read from googling, the second CPU is sometimes used for Graphics, and I can find no technical specifications that say there is an actual GPU, but there might be one built into the processor.

Good to know about that 3d thing! Personally, SNES emulation has me the most excited, and has almost no 3d capabilities whatsoever (discounting Super FX and the like, since they are apparently VERY hard to emulate)  and simply has sprites with multiple backgrounds to make up separate layers.

I just had a very curious idea: DevkitPro on the Nspire. Probably a stupid idea, but it could be interesting.

Stupid mosquitoes! They just came back in my area.

[DJ Omnimaga]

For SNES emulation, I think it would probably support only a limited amount of games. Stuff like Star Fox or Star Ocean may be extremly demanding on the processor. Even the best SNES emus have trouble emulating Star Ocean properly. As for GBA emulation it is possible too, but it will end up like TI-Boy SE in the way it will run slower than the original console and have a lot of graphical glitches due to special effects impossible to render on a calculator.

A 3rd party language for the Nspire, similar to Axe Parser syntax, would come very handy too.

[calc84maniac]

Good to know about that 3d thing! Personally, SNES emulation has me the most excited, and has almost no 3d capabilities whatsoever (discounting Super FX and the like, since they are apparently VERY hard to emulate)  and simply has sprites with multiple backgrounds to make up separate layers.

Keep in mind that the DS does have built-in 2d rendering hardware though, which is probably used in its SNES emulators.

[willrandship]

The way I see it, Star Ocean, Star Fox and other Strange games like that are the exception rather than the rule. They probably wouldn't even work well with a flashcart, and like you said, many well made emulators can't even load them. Plus isn't half of Star Ocean the Music anyways? Sound emulation on this would either be nothing or horrible.

Edit: yeah, something like AXE or NewProg would rock, and probably compile extremely quickly!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Sound emulation could be very possible, but for SNES it may be hard to reproduce the sound exactly. Plus we have yet to discover how to output sound through the link port anyway (84+ keypad). In Star Ocean the main issue was graphics compression used I think. It's what caused the most issues when emulating it.

I think other games might be fine, plus they would fit well in the calc resolution, except maybe Secret Of Mana, which used a much higher resolution width (512 pixels) and would most likely need to be scaled down:

[willrandship]

Yeah. Maybe that's why it ran so much slower than my other games on the Emu!

I just had a thought: Since Ndless is written mainly in java, how hard would a mac port be, considering the source is pretty much there? (Java being an interpreted language and all)

[DJ Omnimaga]

I didn't have slow down problems in SoM/SD2, even on my Pentium II 350 MHz. I used Zsnes, though. Snes9x ran choppily on my old PC.

As for Ndless for mac, Idk if it would be easy, you would probably need to ask an expert Mac programmer. I think on United-TI forum there was talk about porting Ndless to Mac and Linux, but since Ndless 2.0 will most likely obsolete Ndless 1.0 soon, they might prefer to wait until it's out.

[willrandship]

I guess I'll just use nspire8x, but I'm not sure if it requires Navnet. I deleted it already, since it was taking up so much archive space.

EDIT: Hey, I just got an idea. Since the nspire usb is OTG, could we hook up a usb sound card?

[ztrumpet]

Wow, these are cool ideas!

I like the usb sound card one.  Could that work?

[willrandship]

I think so, providing an assembly driver was written. No messy USB emulation would be necessary.

I think the 84+s usb is also OTG, but I'm not positive. Can two 84+s link together directly through usb?

EDIT: here's a link to the kind of sound card I'm talking about.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22475
It would allow for extremely high quality sound, as the sound doesn't have to be manually controlled by the software.

I got my NSpire today!!!!! I must say it's a bit bigger than I expected, but it's quite awesome.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Mhmm that's great! I should mayeb get one at one point. Is it easily findable in offline stores, though? Because you have to remember about 95% of the users on this forum are under 18 and their parents won't let them buy things online or they can't buy online at all.