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:

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.

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

Thanks for the news and the links DJ_O - I'm quite busy this week-end.


Two more TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition news today, but not yet translated into english:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11276 (about the colors and TI-Basic)
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11278 (about a math bug fix I reported in 2008)

In TI-Basic you can draw in 15 different colors on the graph screen:


Color 0 (in asm) on the graph screen is transparency for displaying the background, which is assumed to be encoded in 256 colors - but you won't be able to control this directly from a TI-Basic program.

Let's sum up things - the graph screen has:
- a 16 colors foreground you can deal with in TI-Basic
- a 256 colors background you cannot deal with in TI-Basic

Question, when you recall a 4 bit picture, does it still use something similar to the OR logic like on the monochrome models? I mean how on monochrome models, if a picture had white areas it didn't update that part of the LCD. Black pixels stayed black. This was pretty handy because it allowed text transparency.



If the CSE still use OR logic to recall pics (or whatever it is called when it involves color sprites), then we could get graphics like this using just ASCII:



On a regular 84+, a similar program looks like this:



Here is the source ([xhat] being the x with an horizontal bar above it in the VARS->Statistics menu):

:
:ClrDraw
:"[xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]KKKKKKKKKKKK[xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]            [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]            [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]            [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]        [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]        [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]        [xhat][xhat][xhat][xhat]
:For(Z,0,8
:Text(‾1,7Z,1,sub(Ans,16Z+1,15
:End
:"88888888888888888888888888888888WWWWWWWWWWWW8888            8888            8888            88888888        88888888        88888888        8888
:StorePic 0
:For(Z,0,8
:Text(‾1,7Z,0,sub(Ans,16Z+1,15
:End
:RecallPic 0
:StorePic 0

Also I don't understand why TI chose light gray backgrounds for yellow/white/light gray text. It's hard to read. Why not dark gray or black?

Also, would it be possible to change the background color in BASIC programs using ASM libs?

Wait, since when did we assume background images were 256 colors? I thought we decided they were 16-bit color.

DJ_O, the old LCD controller has no support for transparency/OR logic. That's implemented in software.