TI-81 enthusiasts, it's the great day for you!





The TI-81 was the first TI graphing calculator, released in 1990.

With the TI-80, they were the last non-Nspire graphing calculators to be "opened" for dumping, emulation and assembly support.

Like the TI-80, the TI-81 didn't have a link port, so you had to type all programs by hand.


Moreover, the first TI-81 produced in 1990-1991 didn't even include the backup Lithium battery.
So you had to replace batteries before they were too low, one by one, and quickly.


The last TI-81 produced in 1995 and running the V2.0V ROM were using a different PCB: a TI-82 PCB (model which had just been released at that time) with lower capacity RAM/ROM chips and with all the linking electronics removed.


Knowing that, I developped a trick, which let you emulate the TI-81 V2.0V with a TI-82 emulator by just concatenating severall copies of the ROM.

The problem is that this emulation was not accurate. You couldn't install the Unity kernel and run assembly programs.

We needed a true TI-81 emulator.

TilEm source code has been including TI-81 emulation for 2 years, but no updated binaries were ever released. You had to compile by yourself...





And now comes the good news.

On TI-Planet, we have added an online TI-81 emulator based on the above trick.
But more than that, its makes the impossible possible!
You can load programs although the real hardware doesn't have a link port.
We just hot-write the programs in RAM, which is not complicated at all as the TI-81 has fixed offsets and no VAT.


You can launch it from each TI-81 program available on TI-Planet.

It will be available for every TI-81 program you upload to TI-Planet, if you use the official 81P file format which is very similar with the 82P/83P format (severall 81P DOS tools were distributed by TI to use with their old PC/Mac TI-81 simulator).





But there's another good news for TI-81 enthusiasts! 

I've contacted WabbitEmu's author, and now you get a new WabbitEmu with TI-81 support!


So unlike the above emulator, this time, in theory, it's possible to install the Unity kernel.
But, as the TI-81 does not have a link port, you can not sent 81P programs for now...



Sources:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8776
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=120899#p120899

Links:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=3950&play=1&mode=81
http://wabbit.codeplex.com/releases/view/44625

Hooray! Well done.

Awesome work guyss!

Wow this is awesome. But does the WabbitEmu version you have there has the ROM built in or not? Also, I wonder how do we make a 81P program, assuming we have Windows 7 64 bits? I'm curious because in 2008 I made a TI-81 port of Illusiat 1, which uses all 37 available program slots and the entire user RAM.

Yeah this is pretty awesome indeed. Glad to see more calcs integrated in WabbitEmu.

Quote from: AzNg0d1030 on February 18, 2012, 10:38:34 pm

Wow, someone actually managed to get all this!

I'm still sad that no one seems to know about the rom version "V2.00"
Everyone knows "V2.0V" But not mine

Unknown version? You should send it for examination to someone who is able to dump the ROM.

I've sent you a PM AzNg0d1030.

Yes, TI-81 ROMs are quite hard to dump as there is no link port.
You need to type a huge assembly program by hand without any error and use some trick to make the TI-81 launch it. This will output the ROM content on the screen.
Then you need to record the screen for something like 30mins with a cam, and use some OCR on the video.


I've allready made the video (although I didn't perform the ocr step myself) for both ROMs 1.1K and 1.6K.

The community has now dumped 1.1K, 1.6K, 1.8K, and V2.0V.

With your report, we can extend the list of existing undumped ROMs to:
1.0, 1.1, 1.5K, 1.6V, V2.00

And as far as I can say, for some reason those are rare ROMs.


If you own such a TI-81, I think the best way would be to send it to me for some weeks.
I've allready been sent severall prototype/rare calculators by various TI community members and by the Datamath museum without any problem.

I'm ok to pay for the shipping cost.


It might seem unimportant to you, but if you have an undumped TI-81 version, you might be holding in your hands one of the last working TI-81 with that version in the world.
So if we don't dump it now,we might loose it forever.


Thanks for your report.

There is such a thing as a V2.00?

I don't know much about 81s.  I only have an 84+

Hmm if the LCD has missing LCD lines, then dumping the ROM is impossible I think, because the screen needs to be filmed then a software is used to read the characters through the video, which are not completely visible in your case. That's unless the image reader thing actually checks the last row only and that every line of numbers appears at the bottom at least once.

As for the attach button I think your computer is messed up AzN because it's not the first time you report problems that no one else has. You have to click Quote or Reply then there's a file upload form on that page. If it's not there then it's a problem on your computer or browser(s) end.

Probably you could make the dumper not dump in the last column of LCD. TravisE on that UTI thread said he got a defect LCD as well and managed to still dump the ROM. So yeah you might want to consult BrandonW for help.