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Offline critor

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TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« on: November 13, 2012, 03:56:03 pm »
Today on #omnimaga, Vijfhoek has released some huge photos about the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.



You can count the screen pixels and you'll find out that it is 320x240 like on the TI-Nspire:


Another great information comes from the memory manager screen:

The free RAM space of 22792B seems normal, but...
Look at that free space of 3293KB for the archive memory! Yes, more than 3.2MB archive space, meaning more than twice the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition arvchive space (1.5MB)! ;D
The 2MB TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Flash ROM chip has probably been increased here to at least 4MB.

Note that according to this menu, you can store images in your calculator. They are merged with screen captures (Pic0-9 variables).



Source with more images: http://imgur.com/a/GeDfG#H3DzV
Source for technical specifications: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=132299#p132299
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 03:58:43 pm by critor »
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Offline mlytle0

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2012, 05:27:44 pm »
23K of free memory?  Is that the best that TI can do?  Another intentional cripple, this one, albeit with a much prettier face...

The TI-89 was the last calc they produced that was 'minimally crippled', and they're phasing that one out.

That leads me to think any speed-up over current TI Z80 products will be modest at best...They're sooooo terrified of taking any shine away from the Nspire line, their 'higher' crippled product line...

If Casio would just produce a CAS for the Prizm, they could clean TI's clock.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 05:32:45 pm by mlytle0 »
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Offline Vijfhoek

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2012, 05:28:41 pm »
I don't really understand, because they gave us 4MB of archive... Why not give us a load of RAM aswell?
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 05:28:50 pm by Vijfhoek »
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2012, 05:30:12 pm »
Quote from: Vijfhoek on November 13, 2012, 05:28:41 pm
I don't really understand, because they gave us 4MB of archive... Why not give us a load of RAM aswell?
That would require a massive rewrite of their math engine and variable handlers, and even the variable formats, basically anything that accesses user RAM.
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Offline Eeems

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2012, 05:32:59 pm »
Why would it require a re-write? Wont the extra ram just be extra pages that you can map onto a bank?
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #5 on: November 13, 2012, 05:34:08 pm »
Quote from: Eeems on November 13, 2012, 05:32:59 pm
Why would it require a re-write? Wont the extra ram just be extra pages that you can map onto a bank?
Yes, but the entire OS uses flat pointers that carry no page information. Plus, taking banking into account would make the slow OS even slower.
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Offline Vijfhoek

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2012, 05:35:03 pm »
Hm, maybe they have put in more RAM, but haven't rewritten the OS or something like that.
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Offline Eeems

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #7 on: November 13, 2012, 05:40:36 pm »
Quote
Yes, but the entire OS uses flat pointers that carry no page information. Plus, taking banking into account would make the slow OS even slower.
How much slower would banking make it?
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Offline DrDnar

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #8 on: November 13, 2012, 05:42:04 pm »
23 K of RAM suggests that they are not switching to an eZ80. 3.2 MB of flash means they've done something that breaks ports 6 and 7. There's no way of knowing how broken existing tools will be. My guess is that port 6 will exclusively map flash and port 7 will exclusively map RAM, which will break a small number of programs. My guess is also that they have not restored the calculator back to 128 K of RAM; in fact, there may well be only 48 K of RAM. Even if the Z80 is clocked at 50 MHz, games will have a hard time driving all those pixels, and buffered graphics will be painful to program, if there's even enough RAM at all.

The existing BASIC parser doesn't support reading directly from flash. Also, the OS goes out of its way to prevent you from passing RAM pages (80h+) to functions that are supposed to manipulate flash. This is why, when there was 128 K of RAM, you couldn't use the extra RAM as flash---TI went out of their way to make sure we couldn't do such a thing, probably because they didn't want us to execute apps from RAM.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 05:48:05 pm by DrDnar »
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2012, 05:42:33 pm »
Knowing TI, infinitely. :P

I mean, even us asm programmers prefer not to stream from archive because it gives so much overhead to check for page boundaries.
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Offline Builderboy

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #10 on: November 13, 2012, 06:11:28 pm »
This looks like a fairly good calculator, but I am pretty worried as to how the new screen might limit games, instead of benefit them.  The reason I am worried is because the screen has been scaled up by a factor of 100 (320x240 = 76800 pixels to write to, whereas the regular 84/83 only has 768 bytes of screen memory).  This new screen is significantly larger than the 83/84, but the processor is at most 5 times faster, which means for programs that need to update large portions of the screen every frame (like tilemappers), there might be a large amount of slowdown.
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Offline Vijfhoek

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #11 on: November 13, 2012, 06:12:30 pm »
Also, don't forget the fact that the screen is color, so worst case it would be 3 bytes per pixel..
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Offline DrDnar

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #12 on: November 13, 2012, 07:10:59 pm »
(7:00:35 PM) DrDnar: On the TI-84+C, create a program with the contents: AsmPrgm:210080:36E1:23:36E5:23:36C9:CD0080:EF0745:C9 and run it with Asm(. Tell us what number it displays. We're expecting 40355.
(7:06:46 PM) DrDnar: Basically, if AsmPrgm:210080:36E1:23:36E5:23:36C9:CD0080:EF0745:C9 crashes instead of spitting out a number, we're screwed and won't be able to do anything until getting our hands on the hardware ourselves.

Er, so you can't use colons (the : character) in asm programs. You need to do
Code: [Select]
:AsmPrgm
:210080
:36E1
:23
:36E5
:23
:36C9
:CD0080
:EF0745
:C9
Update:
(7:33:24 PM) OmnomIRC: (O)<calc84maniac> any particular reason you're doing pop hl \ push hl \ ret instead of pop hl \ jp (hl) ?
(7:33:53 PM) DrDnar: Hmm, that's pretty smart.
(7:33:58 PM) DrDnar: .z80 jp (hl)
(7:34:13 PM) DrDnar: Saves like five bytes.
(7:34:25 PM) OmnomIRC: (O)<calc84maniac> I'm thinking a LD HL,$E9E1 \ LD ($8000),HL \ CALL $8000 \ BCALL(_DISPHL) \ RET
(7:34:32 PM) VijfIrssi: less typing for meh :D
(7:34:38 PM) DrDnar: Yeah, do that.
(7:34:46 PM) DrDnar: @z80 LD HL,$E9E1 \ LD ($8000),HL \ CALL $8000 \ BCALL(_DISPHL) \ RET
(7:34:47 PM) RunerBot: [Z80] Assembly \ Pastebin attempt failed \ 13 bytes \ 21E1E9220080CD0080EF0745C9
(7:36:32 PM) DrDnar: New correct address: 40350
Code: [Select]
:AsmPrgm
:21E1E9
:220080
:CD0080
:EF0745
:C9Correct address is now 40350.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 07:36:57 pm by DrDnar »
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Offline FloppusMaximus

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #13 on: November 13, 2012, 09:59:39 pm »
With all those pixels, they couldn't have used a less ugly font?

Quote from: calc84maniac on November 13, 2012, 05:30:12 pm
That would require a massive rewrite of their math engine and variable handlers, and even the variable formats, basically anything that accesses user RAM.
They already did so once (the TI-86) and if it were done intelligently, it wouldn't need to be significantly slower.  Whether TI would be willing to go to the extra effort is another question.

Quote from: DrDnar on November 13, 2012, 07:10:59 pm
Basically, if AsmPrgm:210080:36E1:23:36E5:23:36C9:CD0080:EF0745:C9 crashes instead of spitting out a number, we're screwed and won't be able to do anything until getting our hands on the hardware ourselves.
I think you underestimate this community. ;)
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Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: TI-84 Plus C: new photos reveal more than 3MB archive space
« Reply #14 on: November 13, 2012, 10:14:02 pm »
I'm pretty surprised that they didn't put more ram and archive memory into these. That's a bit dissapointing. :(
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