I've released version 0.4 of Mimas, an on-calculator IDE for writing assembly programs on the TI-83+/84+.

First, this release fixes a number of long-standing bugs and annoyances:

 - incorrect definition of fullScrnDraw
 - plotLoc flag should be cleared upon exiting
 - div/mod operators
 - detection of dependency loops
 - archive-on-exit when multiple programs were edited
 - support for IFDEF/IFNDEF in asmto8xv

Second, I've made a few improvements to the conversion tools:

 - use a default output filename for 8xvtoasm (instead of standard output)
 - prompt before overwriting output files
 - asmto8xv accepts options --case-sensitive, --preserve-case, and --fold-case

And third, I've added some new features in the form of "plugins":

 - library symbols menu
 - instruction info popup
 - scroll bar

The plugin concept is something of an experiment.  The idea is that this way I can add new, optional features, while keeping the base application the same size.  I'm interested to see what folks think of this - is it too complicated?  Is it worth the (not insignificant) extra effort of continuing to add features this way?

As always, I welcome your comments, suggestions, bug reports, flames, etc.

... a happy Einstein's Birthday.

Oh, and I think there's some other geek holiday happening today, too.

Like I said over in the Mimas thread, I've been experimenting a bit to see how practical it would be to sign apps on the calculator.  So I figured I'd take a look at how Axe generates applications.

(App signing on the calc is never going to be instantaneous (except maybe on the Nspire in ARM mode), so you probably don't want to do it every time you build an app, but it would be nice to have it as an option when you want to distribute your app to others.)

Thus, a few points:
1. It seems that when Axe generates an app, the "signature" is filled with zeroes.  It would make life a lot easier, from my perspective, if you used FF bytes instead (and since the signature is invalid either way, it shouldn't matter what you put there initially.)

2. App signatures on the 83+ must begin with the bytes 02 2D 40 (followed by 66 bytes of data), not 02 0D (the latter is used for OS signatures as well as for app signatures on the 89/92+.)

3. Does Axe deal with the 55-mod-64 bug?  (An application must not be exactly 55 bytes long mod 64; if it is, it can't be installed on a TI-73 or 83+ BE due to a bug in the boot code.  So if an app is 55 bytes mod 64, RabbitSign will add an extra byte to the end, and increase the app length field accordingly.  This would be easy to do at the time the app is compiled, and hard to do later.)

4. Only tangentially related to app signing, but does Axe deal with the FF-at-the-start-of-a-page bug?  (If you have FF at the beginning of any app page, the OS will set the entire page to FFs when apps get defragmented.  I wrote a program to patch the OS and fix this bug, but it's best to avoid that if at all possible.)