It seems that there will finally be a 3rd-party TI-Nspire CX emulator, after previous speculations that this might never happen due to the following:

Quote

Is anyone making a CX emulator?

For now, no, because:

Quote

Or is it similar enough to the old Nspire that it would be just an update with some changes of the nspire emulator?

The CX hardware is presumably reasonably similar to the Touchpad hardware (besides the difference in bpp for the screen), but there's a significant software difference: as mentioned by critor above, unlike the boot2 in Clickpad & Touchpad calculators, the boot2 in the CX is partially encrypted, and decrypted by the boot1.
This extra step is the cause of the noticeable delay (sigh) between 50% and 60% on the progress bar, a delay which doesn't exist on the older models...

In order to work correctly, an emulator for the CX would therefore require a boot1 image (*), unlike an emulator for the Clickpad & Touchpad... but the problem is, how to get that boot1 image ?
1) dumping the boot1 requires an arbitrary code execution exploit;
2) this hurdle will eventually be overcome in the future (like on pretty much any closed platform in the past two decades), but the result cannot be redistributed: the boot1 contains TI's copyrighted code...

Because of 2), users of a hypothetical CX emulator will have to go through the extra steps of dumping the boot1 of their own CX... but they cannot do that at the time of this writing, because there's no Ndless 3.0...


(*): embedding the boot2 decryption code into the emulator is not possible: circumventing protection measures would easily fall under the DMCA, and this time, TI would have a better case than they did for the signing key fiasco.

Now there is now one in circulation between Ndless 3.1 testers and developers:



Of course, given what is quoted above, this emulator, the day it comes out, will most likely require extra steps for the user before he can use it at all, because requesting a boot1 image on the forums or posting one for download is against the rules, like ROMs that contains copyrighted material. However, when Ndless 3.1 will come out, this should be easier for people who owns the actual calculator.


Regarding Ndless 3.1, according to the TI-Planet news from which the above information (except the quote) and animated screenshot are from, Ndless 3.1 seems to be protected against TI-Nspire OS reboots. Remember how in Ndless 1.1 and 2.0 everytime your calculator rebooted, Ndless got uninstalled? In Ndless 1.1 this was particularly bad, because installing Ndless 1.1 required access to a computer and USB port, so if your calculator crashed and you had no computer access for a long while, then you were screwed. Well... it seems Ndless 3.1 fixes that problem, which is good news, because apparently installing Ndless 3.1 requires a computer too, not to mention having to reinstall Ndless after every reboot sometimes became annoying.

Yeah also often the installation of Ndless 1.0 failed. I hope for Ndless 3.1 this isn't the case.

Also I hope Ndless 3.1 installing will not be Windows-only like 1.1. We got a lot of Linux users now.

Yeah it was a jar file, but the main problem was that it was dependent on TI-Nspire Computer Link Software 1.3, which is Windows-only.

Not to mention 1.3 didn't run properly on Windows 7 (Freeze on exit and it also had another problem I forgot). 1.4 did, but it didn't support Ndless 1.1 at first.

Holy crap, Ndless 3
This is awesome!

I wonder if there will be a color ndoom port now

I wonder if there will be a color ndoom port now

Probably