I'm not sure if this is because I bought my 85 on Ebay and if it got overclocked or anything, but the speed difference was quite shocking. I wonder if anyone else here has a TI-85 and could test? I know 86 BASIC is much slower than on the 83+ (like, 30% slower or close, I even tried in emulators) but I didn't thought the older version of this model would run faster

Why does TI brings this surprises?

Yep. Ti-86 is about 1/2 the speed of an 85.

It's apparently caused by the way Ti did the ram paging to add the extra ram. Even ASM'ers tend to have problems with it.

The only saving grace the 86 had in my opinion was pxltext. Other than that and the extra ram, the 85 was superior in almost every way.

To be fair, I always liked my 85 better than the 86. The only things I prefer for the 86 are the extra RAM, the built-in ASM support for BASIC programmers (Asm( command to run libs), the easier to read LCD. Besides that, I don't need the other new stuff there might be much, plus the slow 86 BASIC is always what made me never venture into 86 BASIC programming (read: porting my 83+ games). This is not to mention code is much larger even after tokenization

Heya and welcome here CVSoft. Thanks for the test. My test definitively gave weird results, though. I was really shocked when I saw how much slower than my 85 the calc ran. I would need to check the ROM versions at one point. Do you think it could be that the 85 calc was overclocked by its previous owner that sold the calc on Ebay? I know, however, that some TI-84+, for example, run slightly slower or faster than some others and report speeds of 14.5 to 16.5 MHz or something, from what I remember.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Texas Instruments has an history of screwing up when programming their calculator softwares. Maybe when they made the TI-86 software from the 85 one, they did not take in account the paged memory or changed some code while accidentally unoptimizing it, and as result, its TI-BASIC language runs slower than the older model? I know on the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition OS 1.13, sometimes the calculator will suddenly start running at speeds even slower than the TI-83 Plus, even though the calc is around 15 MHz instead of 6. As for other examples of errors they might do, when TI-Nspire OS 3.0.1 got released, there were several reports about calculators being permanently broken after the first reboot of the software, which lead to the software being recalled and eventually OS 3.0.2.

DJ_O:
The easiest way is not to compare speeds with other TI calcs, but to compare with the video. Your TI-85 is within 10% of mine, and mine has only 46% free RAM. I think your TI-86 is slow. What ROM versions are you using? [As mentioned <a href="http://ourl.ca/8935/275538">here</a>, I use ROM 9.0 & 1.6, respectively]
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I'll do some Virtual TI emulations to determine if the ROM version creates a difference.