Have no fear, DJ. Double buffering has nothing to do with split screens.

LCD displays require dedicated RAM to store their current image. This is their first buffer. Single-buffered drawing writes directly to it. However, since this involves dealing with the display controller, it's slower than normal RAM access, and it results in screen flickering.

In Axe, and most Assembly programs, we use a 'double buffer' which is simply a copy of what will be displayed stored in RAM. This is copied over once all drawing actions on it are finished, resulting in only one slow copy, rather than one for every action.

TIOS, however, is even worse: It runs a double buffer setup, but it copies it to the single buffer every time it does a drawing action. Since these drawing actions are very small (well, except bitmap) the resulting performance is as bad as a single-buffer solution in every way, but also takes up the extra RAM of a double buffer solution.

The best place to see this in action is in TI's apps, like the periodic table. You can see each line being drawn, with significant delay. A double-buffered display would draw it in RAM, then copy the picture over to the display RAM, resulting in a far smoother application.


And yes, it would be terrible if they make no improvements and just use the old emulator plus some color.

If this is an ARM processor, I can't wait to see how long it would take to hack the Nspire OS onto it.

That would be a terrible waste to make it an emulator for its opperation.  I really hope it has an eZ80 core.  The faster clock speed and single-cycle instruction execution would be a great enhancement to existing assembly programs.

Let's hope they don't mess this up.

There's pretty much no chance of the ez80, since AFAICT Texas Instruments never licensed it from zilog. In fact, it doesn't look like anyone did.

It would be really cool if we could get the nspire CAS OS running on this thing. The keys would be wrong, but the CAS touchpad OS never complained about using an 84+ keypad.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised to see the old 32MB RAM chips from the old nspire in it, or maybe a bit lower. I don't think the 84+ emu could run in RAM amounts too much lower, though.

Who knows, maybe the 8xi images will stay at the lower resolution X.x

Although it's unlikely, I'd love for this thing to be running an EZ80. Larger screen res. and more memory would be great as well... For those of you saying a normal Z80 with color wouldn't be that great I'd like to remind you that many older computers(MSX, ZX Spectrum) and game systems (Gameboy color, Sega Master System/Game Gear) Used Z80's and had color.

I hope that everything will still be possible and that they emulate the pixels of the 84+ well
And to the pictures, maybe they are adding a new data format for color ones and both works then?