Just to reiterate, everybody is correct: display performance is vastly improved by not updating the whole screen. I'm sorry if people got the impression that we have to update the whole screen every time we want to change anything. (A controller that accepts only full frames yet operates at less than 10 fps would be extremely strange.) I gave the worst-case scenario of updating the whole screen so that people could know what sort of things are impossible, like full-screen full-motion video and Sonic-style games; and what sort of things are do-able, like Tetris, Snake, Sokoban, Blockdude, Galaxian, Pong, Pac-Man, Solitaire, &c. Also, with any luck, TI will get word of this and do something to address the speed issues. Although, that seems unlikely, since the beta testers would have already mentioned it anyway.

Also, note that the pixels are really, really tiny! If you made a 5x7 font, each character would be a little less than 1 mm wide, which may cause some slight readability issues for some people(!) So, people should not plan on using sprites smaller than 16x16. Similarly, high-resolution fonts are a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, large sprites require lots of memory, so it's a good thing we have more of it.

Article now cross-posted (and translated into French too) on TI-Planet

http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11287&lang=en  /  http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11287&lang=fr

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TL; DR: TI is not really supporting us with its 84+CSE.

Would you guys recommend obtaining one? It seems to me that most are pretty bummed about the lack of performance quality.

I guess we'll see how it turns out.

This is kind of what we're about - taking these underpowered, poorly-made things and doing amazing stuff with them

Here's the clock speed tester program's source code. As you can see, it's a pretty simple program, but we still know enough to get some good hacking going.

Like tr1p1ea said, I am curious about how people will overcome the limitation. The fact that it's not locked down like the Nspire might attract coders more, since most people code for calcs to push them to their limits rather than just trying to get Crysis 2 running. According Kerm's screenshot on Cemetech, the speed is much faster than the PRIZM for TI-BASIC, although slower than the TI-83 Plus. I just hope that it won't just make games unplayably slow.

By interlacing, do you mean doing something like the 1st Mario in this GIF?



This might be handy for some games, although some might be totally unplayable that way.

I'M getting the calculator no matter if it's slower, since it's actually a lot faster than PRIZM BASIC and even if ASM is slower, this actually means that a bunch of people will actually enjoy the calc more due to the challenge.