TI bans community calculator emulation

[SpiroH]

Come on, for me it's obvious. They're just trying to increase their emulators sales ($$$) to protect their investment. That's all!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Who knows... maybe in order to discourage emulation they'll eventually replace the processor in the calc with a quad-core 3.5 GHz one and add 4 GB of RAM so that it's as hard as possible to emulate it on any modern computers?

[blue_bear_94]

That would drastically increase the cost of the calculator.

[aeTIos]

WHAHAHA! I laughed so hard when I read this. So how exactly are TI going to sue me?

rofl

[ElementCoder]

Who knows... maybe in order to discourage emulation they'll eventually replace the processor in the calc with a quad-core 3.5 GHz one and add 4 GB of RAM so that it's as hard as possible to emulate it on any modern computers?

And then still hardwire the limit to the 90MHz they're at now How are they planning to control this anyway.

[Stefan Bauwens]

The way it sounds is that they basically totally don't wanna be held responsible for bad things that happen on the emulator.
So maybe they wouldn't really care if make use of an emulator at my own "risk".

[willrandship]

If they want ridiculously difficult to emulate, they should roll their own FPGA soft processor that uses some really freaky stuff, and is totally black-box. Especially the ROM. Good luck causing a stack overflow when you don't know what bitsize you're using. (It would be 12-bit RAM, for one)

[Hayleia]

Come on, for me it's obvious. They're just trying to increase their emulators sales ($$$) to protect their investment. That's all!

There are several kind of people:
- "basic" students, who don't care about emus. They won't buy emus. Especially if they don't own the calc, which they could not test if there is no free emu available, so really, they won't buy any emu.
- coders, who want to code efficiently with a fast emulator. But TI's emulators never were fast so those people won't buy emus (or make me dream, will TI manage to code something that truly works well ?)
- Teachers who use the emu they can.

So the only emulator sales are based on teachers. But will they really make more money on teachers by banning emus ? Personnally, I only saw a teacher use an emulator in my school once, and it was an official emu (I think it was TI SmartView) so TI won't make more money on my school by banning emus.

[DJ Omnimaga]

One thing I am thinking about is that since education is their main focus, the fact that many teachers here use WabbitEmu (often from student influences) instead of the official emulator might hurt TI's sales. Maybe if TI offered deals to schools to buy calcs/softwares in bulk for cheaper, they might decide to not renew those agreements or deals if the school starts using third-party emulators with pirated ROMs. And of course some calc users might be illiterate about copyrights and might be scared of the message.

It's definitively what SpiroH's said. There's no way they can enforce that rule and I'm pretty sure that they're aware of that. That's unless, of course, in the future, government/police/ISPs manages to monitor your everyday computer activities and allow some companies to check if anyone is downloading certain types of files and/or how they use them.

[blue_bear_94]

I heard that some teacher use third-party emulators, though.

[Lionel Debroux]

And they're right to do so without paying a dime to an overly greedy company.
If they wanted fewer of their main target users to ever use third-party emulators, they could have taken emulation / simulation more seriously much earlier. It's their loss if they didn't see the light earlier.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Don't some school get those calcs and softwares for far cheaper than us, though? I was sure that they got them for over half the price... (In such case they could care less about the company's greediness, unless they cared about students being charged way too much)

[Lionel Debroux]

Some schools, teachers and pupils do indeed get the items at discount prices... but at even at half the price, the devices are still overpriced
In our economical system, companies aim at making money... but they are under no obligation to milk consumers over so many years using the same old overpriced hardware (where a small variation is introduced once in a while).

[fb39ca4]

One thing I am thinking about is that since education is their main focus, the fact that many teachers here use WabbitEmu (often from student influences) instead of the official emulator might hurt TI's sales. Maybe if TI offered deals to schools to buy calcs/softwares in bulk for cheaper, they might decide to not renew those agreements or deals if the school starts using third-party emulators with pirated ROMs.

It isn't pirated if the school dumps it from their own calculator, and it isn't against the license terms if they acquired it before the change went into effect.

[blue_bear_94]

What concerns me, though, is the inability for new users (not getting the ROMs before change) to use emulators.