Did you know that placing the maximum exponent at 10^99 was a completely arbitrary move by TI? In any case, I did, and I got rid of that limitation.

With this OS patch, your calculator can handle exponents from E-127 to E127.



I'm going to guess that TI added this limitation to keep up with their older calculators which only had room for a two digit number. They also probably kept it at two digits because they used a nice little hack to parse the numbers after the E token. But, in any case, I took off the bounds checking so that large numbers don't throw an ERR:OVERFLOW and modified the number parser to allow 3 digit numbers.

I made a patch for 1.19, 2.43, 2.53, and 2.55. The 2.55 is the ugliest of them all as I had to locate some code on page 00 (which could potentially mean compatibility issues with other patches), but they all work.


If you understand how TI-floats work, you might be wondering why I didn't allow E-128, and the reason for this is that there's a certain routine which could underflow back to E127, and that would just cause weird issues that I don't want to deal with. So E-127 is the limit.

I included the patcher with it's patch files if you want to see what is going on.

Edit:
    And like always, there's an option to undo the patch.

That doesn't sounds like more precision at all!  That sounds like a larger range with the same amount of precision

That doesn't sounds like more precision at all!  That sounds like a larger range with the same amount of precision

Yeah, I totally realize that. But I don't know what else to call it.

I just tried it on my 84+SE, it is great
Is there a way to make it work on the 83+ too ?

He mentioned the patch works on OS 1.19, so I assume that means TI-83+ is supported.

Woo, thepenguin strikes again

Yay, now it works like some of the older calcs I saw I think a friend of mine had a TI-86 or TI-85 that could use numbers up to 10^127.

The TI-68k series uses binary for the exponent, BCD for the mantissa. Exponents can go between -16383 to +16382, but most math functions don't like exponents below -999 or above +999.
( http://debrouxl.github.com/gcc4ti/timath.html#bcd )

Btw, I showed this topic to a TI employee (a z80 master ) and he said it's awesome (or, well, at least talking about all of us here : "Those guys are awesome")