Members of the community, namely critor and Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell have now had their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators for a week and four days, respectively. In that time, Cemetech and TI-Planet and their members have been enthusiastically exploring this new calculator. Among the many important developments from the past week:

• I wrote a review of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, examining it as a math and science tool and as a programming platform.
  
• My review was picked up on Slashdot, Gizmodo, Gizmodo Australia, and the MIT Technology Review, among others.
  
• I added TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition support to jsTIfied, Cemetech's online graphing calculator emulator. A news article demonstrated the support in action.
  
• Critor ran the first third-party ASM program on the TI-84+CSE, a program created by DrDnar. I created and released the first LCD-manipulating graphical demo program, called PCSEBall (animated screenshot from jsTIfied at the link), and Cemetech member tr1p1ea created an ASM program that displays a picture of the Joker from Batman, which I ran on my calculator for him.
  
• Critor documented the speed of the menus on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, showing the slight sluggishness I had discussed in my review. TI-Planet staff Adriweb also ported the classic lowercase-enabling ASM program to the new calculator, available for download in the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition program section of the Cemetech Archives.
  
• I added SourceCoder support for 265x165-pixel Picture files and 133x83-pixel Image files for the new calculator. Simply upload an image with those sizes to SourceCoder, and you can export the relevant calculator image format. This Cemetech topic demonstrates the feature in action, with sample images.
  
• Texas Instruments appears to be making an effort to limit emulator use from reading the terms of their EULA, a controversy first discovered here on Cemetech and later disseminated by the TI-Planet staff. Join the discussion if you have opinions and predictions on what will happen with this.
  
• Ryan Boyd ("Phero") of ticalc.org demonstrated TI-BASIC speed on the TI-84+CSE's homescreen on his own calculator, while at the behest of Cemetech and Omnimaga programmers, I nailed down the speed of graphscreen drawing.
  

We look forward to lots more news as the weeks roll on and more programmers get their hands on the new calculator. The community including this site and Cemetech will be staying on top of new programs released, tools created, and features discovered, so keep your eyes on the new posts and visit often!



Source:
http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=568

In your opinion, is the 84+CSE worth buying, for programmers? Why or why not?

Well for BASIC in longer terms we will most likely have ASM libs like Doors CS 8 so we might be safe. I believe that certain pure BASIC games might be viable as well, such as puzzle games and RPGs or maybe even simpler action games. Map loading might be an issue but for some reasons people didn't seem to mind ROL3 and Exodus map loading that much (it took 30 seconds to load every map).

Axe will be needed, though, because it's by far the most popular language on any existing calc for games and a lot of people prefer to work with it than ASM and BASIC due to its high-level syntax and fast speed (although I seriously hope for a lot of ASM dev and some BASIC tricks discussion too, especially the former). Lib-enhanced TI-83+ BASIC, BBC Basic and to a lesser extent Grammer never really took off compared to Axe and built-in languages, but in Grammer case it's only due to being in direct competition with Axe.