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Topics - KermMartian
31
« on: March 18, 2013, 09:09:13 pm »
Long have we known that the TI-83 Plus calculator, and its predecessors like the TI-83 and TI-82, can be overclocked by replacing a single capacitor. Those calculators use what we electrical engineers call an RC tank, a circuit created from a resistor and a capacitor that oscillates. You can create an RC tank circuit that oscillates at f Hz by picking a resistor value R and capacitor value C such that f = 1/(2πRC). Unfortunately, RC tanks are quite sensitive to temperature and battery voltage, and tolerances (manufacturing variations) of resistors and capacitors mean that RC tanks in the real world don't produce precise frequencies. Therefore, for the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition and its children the TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, Texas Instruments logically switched to a crystal oscillator. Until very recently, we believed that the fixed speed of the oscillator meant that overclocking the later calculators was extremely difficult, if not impossible. However, one bricked calculator and one overclocked calculator later, with extensive photography and co-experimenting help from DrDnar, I have successfully overclocked a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition to run at 6.03 MHz, 15.95 MHz, 19.38 MHz, and 22.416 MHz.   The left screenshot shows the results from DrDnar's CPU speed test on an unmodified calculator, while the right screenshot shows the modified calculator. TI included four speed modes on calculators from the TI-83+SE on upward, but the top 3 speeds have always been approximately 15MHz. Over the past few days, we have experimented with unpopulated resistor locations on the TI-84 Plus-family PCBs, hoping that two unpopulated resistors might enable what we always assumed were planned 20MHz and 25MHz speeds when 0-ohm resistors were added. Although this proved fruitless, we made another breakthrough today when I discovered an interesting mapping of a set of four resistors on the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition mainboard, documented in a Cemetech topic. Much soldering and trial-and-error later, I was able to get the calculator running stably up to 22.4 MHz. Any faster and memory reads and LCD writes get unpredictable. Although ports $2E and $2F can be used to let the calculator safely run at speeds up to an estimated 28 MHz, the effective CPU speeds are actually lower due to the added delays. As an added bonus, we believe this technique can be used to overclock even the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, a modification that I will attempt tomorrow. Combined with Calc84Maniac's discovery of an LCD feature that lets us double the rate at which we can transfer whole screens of data to 10FPS, this modification would allow programs to write the LCD at up to 15FPS. If DrDnar or myself succeed in overclocking the TI-84+CSE (which is now shipping from several distributors), we'll let you know.  My modified TI-83+SE. I added a 4-pin socket to let me easily swap out resistor valuesSource:http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8936
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« on: February 23, 2013, 02:53:50 pm »
Members of the community, namely critor and Christopher " Kerm Martian" Mitchell have now had their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators for a week and four days, respectively. In that time, Cemetech and TI-Planet and their members have been enthusiastically exploring this new calculator. Among the many important developments from the past week: - I wrote a review of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, examining it as a math and science tool and as a programming platform.
- My review was picked up on Slashdot, Gizmodo, Gizmodo Australia, and the MIT Technology Review, among others.
- I added TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition support to jsTIfied, Cemetech's online graphing calculator emulator. A news article demonstrated the support in action.
- Critor ran the first third-party ASM program on the TI-84+CSE, a program created by DrDnar. I created and released the first LCD-manipulating graphical demo program, called PCSEBall (animated screenshot from jsTIfied at the link), and Cemetech member tr1p1ea created an ASM program that displays a picture of the Joker from Batman, which I ran on my calculator for him.
- Critor documented the speed of the menus on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, showing the slight sluggishness I had discussed in my review. TI-Planet staff Adriweb also ported the classic lowercase-enabling ASM program to the new calculator, available for download in the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition program section of the Cemetech Archives.
- I added SourceCoder support for 265x165-pixel Picture files and 133x83-pixel Image files for the new calculator. Simply upload an image with those sizes to SourceCoder, and you can export the relevant calculator image format. This Cemetech topic demonstrates the feature in action, with sample images.
- Texas Instruments appears to be making an effort to limit emulator use from reading the terms of their EULA, a controversy first discovered here on Cemetech and later disseminated by the TI-Planet staff. Join the discussion if you have opinions and predictions on what will happen with this.
- Ryan Boyd ("Phero") of ticalc.org demonstrated TI-BASIC speed on the TI-84+CSE's homescreen on his own calculator, while at the behest of Cemetech and Omnimaga programmers, I nailed down the speed of graphscreen drawing.
We look forward to lots more news as the weeks roll on and more programmers get their hands on the new calculator. The community including this site and Cemetech will be staying on top of new programs released, tools created, and features discovered, so keep your eyes on the new posts and visit often!   Source:http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=568
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« on: February 13, 2013, 07:24:43 pm »
You can now enjoy your TI graphing calculator right from your iOS6 Device! jsTIfied, Cemetech's online TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus emulator, is now a fully-functional emulator for Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. The key breakthrough to make this a reality is the ability to encode a ROM in JPEG image data. You can use jsTIfied on a computer to export your ROM as JPEG file, which you can then send to your iOS device over iCloud, email, DropBox or iTunes. Once completed, you can navigate over to jsTIfied and upload the image as if it were a normal ROM. The steps required to download the image are on the jsTIfied page under the "ROM" tab. Remember that sharing of ROMs is illegal, even in this JPEG state.Some drawbacks to using jsTIfied on your mobile device are speed and the lack of repeated button pressing. For speed, if your ROM fails to load it's best advised to close all of the apps that are running in the background. If you're still struggling for speed restart your device. The iPhone/iPod will run significantly slower than the iPad and in turn, the iPad significantly slower than the computer. When using the mouse in Doors CS, iOS will select the HTML box that contains the on-screen calculator and ask you if you'd like to copy it rather than continue that key press which will make navigating slightly more difficult as well as games that require you press and hold buttons, perhaps even pressing them rapidly. As such, jsTIfied on your mobile device is recommended for actual class related calculations!  Thanks goes out to Runer112 & comicIDIOT for testing the process on their devices and benryves for providing valuable JavaScript pointers. As always, if you have bug reports feel free to submit them! Thanks also to comicIDIOT for his excellent original article on Cemetech.
34
« on: December 31, 2012, 12:33:00 pm »
Long have I enjoyed offline graphing calculator emulators like Virtual TI, TiLeM, and WabbitEmu. The ability to run a TI-83 Plus or TI-84 Plus calculator on a computer is invaluable for math classes and programming, and I have seen more than a few teachers showing calculator skill in class with a projector and an emulator. However, installing an offline calculator emulator is often not feasible, and many popular emulators run only on Windows, not on Linux or Mac OS. To bring you a graphing calculator you can run on any platform with a web browser, I am proud to introduce jsTIfied 1.0. jsTIfied is an online graphing calculator emulator, emulating the TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Plus Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus, and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It runs entirely in your browser using HTML5 and Javascript, so it requires neither Java nor Flash. For legal reasons, you must load your own ROM image, which is stored in your browser and never sent to the Cemetech server. As a full calculator emulator, it offers lots of features: :: Full TI-83+/TI-84+ emulation including accurate LCD physics for good-looking grayscale :: Runs on all major browsers and operating systems :: Can take animated and still screenshots :: Load any .8xp, .8xk, etc program or App to test it :: Drag calculator files onto the jsTIfied LCD to import them :: Can export all files from the emulated calculator :: Integrated with the SourceCoder TI-BASIC IDE/editor, so that you can write programs in SourceCoder and immediately test them on a calculator :: Built-in debugger and CPU/memory view for assembly programmers I could go on and on about the thirteen months of optimization and development that made this project possible, but I'd rather you just get started using jsTIfied as soon as possible. Simply grab your calculator's ROM image (and be aware that many believe it is illegal to download ROMs from Google if you don't own the calculator) and load it into jsTIfied to get started. (Free and fast) registration is mandatory to use jsTIfied only to prevent abuse. Whether you're a student using jsTIfied for math, a teacher using it in a demonstration, or a programmer using jsTIfied to test a project, I hope you enjoy it. Get Started with jsTIfied jsTIfied online graphing calculator emulator "Like" jsTIfied on Facebook 
35
« on: September 28, 2012, 10:07:51 am »
Almost a full year after Manning Publications first contacted me about writing a book on graphing calculator programming, I am proud to announce that "Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus" has been published! To quote directly from the book's description: Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus is an example-filled, hands-on tutorial that introduces students, teachers, and professional users to programming with the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. This fun and easy-to-read book immediately immerses you in your first programs and guides you concept-by-concept, example-by-example. You'll learn to think like a programmer as you use the TI-BASIC language to design and write your own utilities, games, and math programs.As I will be demonstrating at Maker Faire this weekend, graphing calculators like the TI-83+ and the TI-84+ are the perfect way to learn programming. My book assumes no previous programming knowledge and teaches you to think like a programmer, to plan the logic and structure of a program, and to turn that plan into code. While it teaches the TI-BASIC language (and touches for a chapter each on hybrid BASIC and z80 ASM), I think that it would serve as a good guide to anyone looking to get started in programming with any language. Every lesson is interspersed with plenty of code examples that you can test out on your own calculator, which I feel is vital for getting an intuitive feel for a language. I encourage you, whether you are a student, a teacher, or a professional, to grab Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus and give it a read. If you want to learn to program, learn calculator programming, or even if you already know some TI-BASIC and want to learn more advanced techniques, I think this is a great resource. And if you want to start reading it before you buy it, you can check out the free Chapter 1: Diving into Calculator Programming and Chapter 6: Advanced Input and Events chapters. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the book! Important Links Buy Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus on Amazon Buy Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus at Barnes and Noble Table of Contents, sample chapters, and more information from Manning Publications
36
« on: September 18, 2012, 05:20:15 pm »
Early in 2012, I announced jsTIfied, an emulated TI-83 Plus graphing calculator in your browser. Built entirely in Javascript, CSS, and HTML and avoiding the legal pitfalls of a calculator's OS leaving its owner's computer, jsTIfied completely duplicated the functionality of your favorite TI-83+ calculator. You can perform calculations, plot graphs, test programs, and write your own projects. Over the summer, I integrated jsTIfied with the eminent SourceCoder online TI-BASIC editor to allow you to more easily create, test, and publish graphing calculator programs without needing anything besides a web browser. Hardware-wise, the TI-83 Plus is the easiest of the TI-83+/TI-84+ series to emulate, so it was with trepidation that I approached the oft-repeated suggestion that I add TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, and TI-83 Plus Silver Edition support to jsTIfied. I am happy to announce that after a long weekend of coding, testing, and poring over documentation, I have gotten the first bits of TI-83+SE, TI-84+, and TI-84+SE support in jsTIfied functioning. Thanks to the generous Buckeye and the WabbitEmu project, jsTIfied will display one of four spiffy, high-resolution skins matching the calculator version of the ROM you load. It emulates the extra Flash and RAM (the full 128KB!) of the newer graphing calculators, properly implements features like the realtime clock ports, and much more. However, the new support is still very beta, so a few features are known to be missing. Loading apps and programs to the new models does not yet work, Link Assist is a work-in-progress, and the crystal-based Timer0/Timer1/Timer2 are incompletely implemented. However, I'm making swift strides in adding these new features, so by the time you test jsTIfied some of those issues may be fixed. I urge you to load up jsTIfied and give it a try. Please be sure to tell me about any bugs you encounter (other than the ones I mentioned), and mention any suggestions to make the emulator more useable. Please also tell your teachers and friends about it, so that they will avoid the pitfall many of my teachers fell into in struggling with the ancient and now-supplanted VTI emulator. Use the jsTIfied online TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus graphing calculator emulator
37
« on: September 09, 2012, 09:51:25 pm »
The programming language Lua has been around for fifteen years, and has recently gained significant traction as an introductory scripting language. As I mentioned when I first announced the LuaZM project, the TI-Nspire CX has had Lua for about a year now, Texas Instruments' uneasy relationship with hobbyist programmers notwithstanding. I'm proud to release the first beta of LuaZM to the public, along with documentation on the current features of the core program and its included libraries. Create your own .lua programs, then use LuaZM's handy graphical file browser to select a program and run it. LuaZM also includes a command line where you can test out commands and functions. LuaZM is a semi-port of Lua 5.2.1. Please try out this beta, give me feedback, and start publishing your own Prizm Lua programs! Compatibility layers for Nspire and LuaFX programs may be coming soon. Special thanks go to Juju and AHelper for the PrizmIO console library and the File Browser GUI respectively. Download & Read More LuaZM v0.1 - Casio Prizm Lua Interpreter LuaZM reference documentationEdit: The current download is v0.1.1, which fixes zmg.keyMenu(), optimizes zmg.keyMenuFast(), and adds zmg.makeColor().
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« on: September 06, 2012, 08:35:16 pm »
The Casio Prizm is a powerful graphing calculator, and led the charge of color-screen calculators. It already has plenty of fun games available, but educational Add-Ins for the device have been somewhat lacking. Shaun "Merthsoft" McFall's Periodic Table for the Prizm was a great start, and AHelper's gCAS2 brought the Prizm's first semi-symbolic CAS, but few other educational add-ins have been made. I am happy to announce the first full release of Graph3DP, the culmination of six months of sporadic work. Graph3DP is a powerful 3D graphing application for the Casio Prizm (fx-CG10/fx-CG20). Enter one to six 3D equations, and rotate and zoom the resulting graph. You can adjust the window and trace over the mesh to examine X, Y, and Z value. This final 1.0 release has been thoroughly tested, and the underlying equation-parsing system, AHelper's gCAS2, has been overhauled for speed and correctness. Graph3DP understands thirteen built-in math functions, from sin() to atan() to sqrt() to ln(), plus addition, subtract, multiplication, division, grouping, and exponentiation. Give it a download and try it today; this will surely become an permanent fixture on your Casio Prizm. Download Graph3DP 1.0: A Casio Prizm 3D Grapher Video highlighting Graph3DP features 
39
« on: August 17, 2012, 06:04:17 pm »
The Casio Prizm is a powerful calculator, great for both math and playing games. It is particularly great for programming, and for months thoroughly bested the TI-Nspire calculator in offering ASM, BASIC, and C programming. In an attempt to reduce criticism of their apparently anti-student stance, Texas Instruments improved the TI-Nspire to run Lua programs. Lua is a "fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language," an interpreted procedural language. The language has allowed budding Nspire programmers to quickly write games and programs without needing to use a computer. I am happy to announce that I am now bringing Lua to the Casio Prizm graphing calculator, in the form of a full-featured Lua interpreter. After days of porting, rewriting parts of libc (including the longjmp/setjmp system), and learning some SH4 assembly, I am proud to present the first screenshot of the interpreter successfully running on a Prizm. Special kudos to Juju for the PrizmIO library, a port of an Nspire I/O library for C programmers. As you can see from the screenshots, this is just the raw interpreter; although it understands Lua syntax and can parse/lex the language, load libraries, and recognize incorrect code, it is almost entirely lacking in functioning libraries. From here, I will be porting over each of the standard libraries, starting with numbers, strings, and I/O. Please feel free to share thoughts and suggestions here or in the original Cemetech thread. Bonus features: Planned transparent support for Nspire and Lua FX programs. 
40
« on: July 09, 2012, 12:32:23 pm »
As many of you may know, for close to a year I was an administrator of the Evocat.us PvP Minecraft server. It went away for a while, but I'm happy to say that it's back! If you love survival, PvP, and some healthy slaughter, then the Yogiverse is for you. Members of the calculator community have for years banded together in a town called Arcadia, where we collect loot, build awesome houses, and from where we set out to raid other towns. We would love to have you in Arcadia, so hop on one.yogiverse.com and send a /msg to KermMartian, Pizzabboy, AHelper0, or fibiger2 mentioning that you're from Omnimaga/Cemetech. See you there for PvP/mining/building/raiding/killing fun! (If you can't find any of us on the server, just ping me on #cemetech or post here, and I'll add you).  
41
« on: April 01, 2012, 08:57:09 pm »
I'm not sure if anyone at Omnimaga is still doing Prizm hacking, but I figured I might as well cross-post this in case any Omnimaga Prizm coders haven't yet been glancing at Cemetech's recent Prizm work. At any rate, I'm proud to present the first public beta of Graph3DP, a 3d graphing application for the Casio Prizm. Enter one to six 3D equations Z=f(X,Y) in terms of X and Y, adjust the window as need, and spin and zoom the resulting graph! This public beta demonstrates most of the major features of the program, including entering multiple equations, graphing, adjusting settings, and even tracing graphs. Additional work is still to be done on many of the features: :: Debugging and expanding the parser :: Debugging input routines :: Adding the zoom menu :: Adding real-time zooming :: Improving the rotation algorithms to support dynamic axes :: Complete tracing features :: More graph-coloring schemes. Give it a download and try it today! In other news, Cemetech's developers have been hard at work expanding Cemetech's WikiPrizm reference resource for Prizm users and programmers alike, and have been ardently working to learn more about the Prizm's hardware. Ashbad and myself, aided by Fishbot, new Cemetech member brijohn, and others, have been working with things like overclocking and directly accessing the data lines in the Prizm's serial / I/O port. Brijohn, using his experience with Casio's electronic dictionaries and translators, correctly pegged the CPU core as an SH7724 chip from Renesas, whereas previous guesses had ranged from the SH7721 to the SH7730 even to the fx-9860G's SH7705 CPU. With this information, Ashbad has now succeeded in tweaking the CPU speed in software, and will be reporting further findings soon. I'm poring over possible port numbers to determine how to poke the MSIOF port; if I'm successful, bidirectional transfers on both the RxD and TxD lines might be possible, meaning that CALCnet and stereo audio might be coming soon. Download [Casio Prizm] Graph3DP v1.0 Beta 1     
42
« on: February 29, 2012, 02:21:26 pm »
Nearly every math student has a programmable calculator in his or her backpack. The TI 83, TI-83+ Silver Edition, TI 84+, and TI-84+ Silver Edition are more than just powerful graphing calculators: they're a great platform for learning to program and for creating your own math and science programs, practical utilities, and even games. A few months ago, I was approached my Manning Publications to write a book about graphing calculator programming. I've completed six of thirteen chapters and two of the appendices, and I'm happy to announce that the first three of the projected thirteen chapters have been released through Manning's MEAP (Early Access) program. MEAP is sort of like Book v0.3 Beta: you can read chapters as I complete them and offer critiques and feedback, and then you get the full print book or eBook when it gets released in Fall 2012. To quote the official copy: Programming the TI 83+/84+ is an example-filled, hands-on tutorial that introduces students, teachers, and professional users to programming with the TI-83+ and TI-84+ graphing calculators. This fun and easy-to-read book immediately immerses you in your first programs, and guides you concept-by-concept, example-by-example. You'll learn to think like a programmer as you use the TI-BASIC language to design and write your own utilities, games, and math programs. You'll put each new concept into action immediately as you unlock the full potential of your calculator. Along the way, you'll discover tricks to customize, slim down, and speed up your programs, and to learn from the many free programs available on the web. You would be doing me a great service to join in the MEAP, and I hope that if you don't choose to make the investment and join now, that you will consider buying the book when it's published in the fall! I'm sacrificing sleep and sanity to make this an authoritative book, both for TI-BASIC programmers and for anyone looking to learn to program, so I would be eternally grateful to everyone who participates in the MEAP and offers feedback. Official webpage: Programming the TI-83+/84+ to buy and participate Cemetech project page: Links and additional informationEdit: Until March 6th, get 50% off with code TI8384 at checkout!
43
« on: February 02, 2012, 11:33:18 am »
Full discussion in the original threadYou love the game of Tetris on every platform, from your computer to your GameBoy to your TI calculator, so why not enjoy it in brilliant color on your Casio Prizm calculator? Featuring fast-paced gameplay, four play modes, high score tracking, and much more, this game is sure to be a permanent addition to your Prizm. In Marathon mode, try to complete lines for as long as possible as your score and the speed increase. High Speed mode ups the ante with faster drops at lower levels. If you want to start out in a bad situation, try Touchdown mode. With Collapse mode, you can set up giant stacks of tetrominos to score many lines at once. And to really torture yourself, see how long you can last with no line pieces in Sadistic mode. A few months in the making and a mere 185KB, this highly-polished game is a must for your Prizm, and incorporates thorough research into the original versions of Tetris to provide a fun and accurate gaming experience. Although I wrote almost all of this game, a special hat-tip to my coauthor tifreak8x for his testing and motivation, and to the other Cemetech beta-testers for their detailed feedback on beta versions. Download Tetrizm v1.0 for the Casio Prizm Tetrizm v1.0 gameplay video [Youtube]  
44
« on: January 24, 2012, 07:29:22 pm »
Note: crossposted from the Cemetech topic, which will hold updates and such.For many years, perhaps since I first designed the fledgling version of SourceCoder 2.5, I have wanted to make a Javascript graphing calculator emulator. SourceCoder has a keypad that lets you enter tokens and symbols into its editor, but imagine if you could have a real calculator emulator right on the page to test your programs! Imagine if you could do BASIC development and testing online without having to touch an offline emulator or real calculator! This was my dream, but a combination of limited technology, limited experience, and legal hurdles restricted me from following through. No longer. First, the legal hurdles. It is illegal to distribute ROM images, so I couldn't make an emulator with a ROM image hosted on Cemetech. I couldn't even let people upload their own ROM images, or in any way let ROM images touch the Cemetech server. HTML 5 offers a solution to this conundrum in the form of what is called DOM Storage. Cemetech gives the javascript for my z80 core to clients, and they load their (legal, I hope) ROM image from their own personal calculator into their browser, but still entirely client-side. No ROMs are distributed in any form. Second, the technical hurdles. The canvas element of HTML4/5 is powerful and fast enough to be manipulated and display a smooth image of a calculator screen in real-time. Modern computers and modern Javascript implementations are fast enough to run the massive code required for an emulated 6MHz CPU at faster than realtime. In addition, tools such as Google's Closure Compiler exist to optimize and compress Javascript for speed and size. In a total of about four days separated by two months, I have put together jsTIfied, pronounced "justified", a Javasdript TI-83+ emulator. It is not ready for any public testing or release, and thus is sitting happily offline and not anywhere on Cemetech, but I'm proud to announce that it is fully-functional. As you can see from the screenshots below, I can do math, run applications, and I assure you, almost everything else an emulator such as PindurTI can do. Indeed, I owe a debt of thanks to Gergely Patai (or Patai Gergely), the author of the original PindurTI, for swathes of C code that I studied for jsTIfied, and for the key layout that I used for jsTIfied. In homage to PindurTI, I made the appearance resemble that much-loved emulator. I also owe thanks to JSSpeccy, a Javascript ZX Spectrum emulator that heavily contributed to my understanding of emulating a z80 processor, and some segments of code from which found their way into jsTIfied, especially in helping me to wrap my head around emulating interrupts. I have great plans for jsTIfied, including letting you somehow test programs from the archives, run SourceCoder projects, and much more straight from your browser. Before that can happen, there are plenty of tweaks and changes for smoothness to be made and features to be added, so for now, enjoy the screenshots below!
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« on: September 08, 2011, 02:46:30 pm »
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