So- I was a bit surprised not to see anything about these here (instead, I saw them on an Android news site). Though I suppose I could have missed something, I haven't been that active lately.

Android developer Doug Melton has recently released emulators for the TI-83, TI-82, and TI-85. (This is the 86 one). They're ports of the "AlmostReal TI emulators" according to the news article- not really sure what that means though, I'd never heard of such an emulator before.

I'd try one out on my Captivate, except the devices do require Android 2.2 (which I don't have ).

Has anyone else seen these or fooled around with them a bit?

I'll download them and test them on an Android Emulator and on my phone too as soon as I can.

I don't think that distributing any of TI's roms is legal (btw the 82 stats, which is I think the commonest TI in France has an 83 rom).

If the emulators got the ROMs packaged into them, then distributing the emulators is pretty much illegal.

Distributing TI's 8xu files would be just as much a copyright violation as distributing full ROM images.

And it's not Android, but I do have a half-working version of TilEm II on my Neo Freerunner.   I put it together a few months ago, just to see if I could; it's somewhat usable, but it needs a bit more tuning in order to run at full speed (mostly due to the phone's slow graphics chip.)

Unless it isn't a real emu, just something that copies the functions of the calc without actually using any of its OS code.

In that case they are clearly illegally using ROMs. I'm pretty sure this will soon get removed.

On a similar note though... would it be difficult you emulate all of the functions that a program could use such that we could emulate any Basic program without actually using any OS?  It probably would be incredibly tedious, but we know how every works, so it would just be a matter of implementing it.

Probably, but side-effects of it would not be reproduced.  You would have to make it work EXACTLY how it did in all instances of the command.