It has been a busy year for color-screen graphing calculators. Two previous color-screen graphing calculators existed, the Casio Prizm from late 2010 and the TI-Nspire CX from February 2011. However, this year has brought us three new color-screen calculators: the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, the Casio fx-CP400, and the HP Prime. We learned of the HP Prime early this year, and in May, I had the pleasure of an interview with GT Springer, the Education Solutions Architect for HP's calculator division, about this new calculator. Today, I am proud to present a full, formal hands-on review with a real HP Prime.



Our HP contacts sent yours truly, Cemetech administrator Christopher Mitchell, a preview calculator, the sleek handheld pictured above. In the past three days, I have spent many hours learning to use the device's math, graphing, statistics, and even programming features. Although for my fourteen years of graphing calculator use, I have gained most of my experience with Texas Instruments' calculators, I have long been aware of the passionate, even fanatical devotion for HP's calculators that many of their users harbor. As an engineer, I know that HP's calculators have been heralded as aimed squarely at the skilled college and professional users, whereas many of TI's calculators appeal to a high school and standardized testing crowd. I think there's market demand for both types of devices, but the HP Prime appears to be something new from the company. As GT Springer discussed in our interview, he felt that the Prime will likely appeal to a larger cross-section of graphing calculator users than previous HP calculators. In my experiences with it, I think the device's capabilities measure up to that expectation. In this complete review, I'll show you the device's numeric (non-CAS) and symbolic (CAS) math features, powerful graphing features, and other applications. As the seasoned Cemetech member knows, we are particularly passionate about programming and hacking graphing calculators, so I'll look at the surprisingly fast and powerful programming language included on the Prime. Finally, I'll do a quick teardown of the device, so that you can see what makes it tick. The HP Prime is a fast, powerful, and sleek graphing calculator, and although I am of the cruelly realistic opinion that TI will continue to dominate the US market for high school and college graphing calculators, I think that HP has built a powerful, easy-to-use graphing calculator equally at home in the high school Algebra classroom or the college Electromagnetic Phenomena course.

Read the full review for all the details, along with more screenshots and photos!

Summary: The Big Picture
The HP Prime arguably aims to appeal to a broader audience than any other graphing calculator currently on the market. It is meant to provide all the tools that high school students need, students who normally turn to the TI-83+/TI-84+ family, or less frequently, the TI-Nspire CX, Casio Prizm, or Casio fx9860. It also tries to cover the needs of college and graduate students, who traditionally use the TI-89, TI-Nspire CX CAS, or HP's own calculators, and it even sees professionals, about whose calculator choices little is known, as a potential market. In using the Prime, I certainly agree that it has the potential to meet the needs of all three of those markets. It's a sleek, thin, powerful device, and its functionality is about 95% of the way to something I would be happy to use every day for academic and personal projects. The separation between CAS and non-CAS features is a nice touch, not to mention a great way to appeal to standardized testing boards and to teachers. The graphing features are intuitive and ground-breaking in their ability to handle almost any type of expression. In my testing, the screen was crisp and bright, the keys were satisfyingly clicky and responsive, and the battery life was admirable. I even enjoyed the fact that I could choose a custom color theme for the entire interface, switching from the default white-and-blue to a (in my opinion) classier black-and-maroon.

My criticisms are minor, and as a disclaimer, the calculator I used was an engineering sample with a mid-August build date, so some of the issues I ran into may already be fixed. Anyway, to get that final 5% of the way to a great calculator for me (and other students, teachers, and professionals), my biggest suggestions would be in the area of user-friendliness. Even as a seasoned calculator user well-accustomed to interpreting what my calculator expects, many of the error messages on the Prime fell somewhere between ambiguous and mud. When I was trying to use features, a yellow exclamation mark would occasionally pop up, often without me being clear what I had touched to make the device unhappy. Finally, as someone not accustomed to HP calculators, the use of Views was originally foreign to me, and it took me some experimenting to realize that every application had Symb, Plot, Num, Help, View, and Menu Views. While I now understand it and think it's as reasonable a way to arrange the interface as any other system, I didn't find it initially intuitive. Perhaps I should have just spent a few minutes reading the manual, or perhaps there should be a Quick Start application that teaches you to efficiently use the HP Prime.

If your teacher gives you an option to pick your calculator, or you're in college, graduate school, or the workforce, I recommend giving the HP Prime a look, and see if it is right for you. It certainly has a full complement of math and programming features, and your main obstacle to using it might be teachers and classmates accustomed to other companies' devices. My HP contacts tell me that the HP Prime will be available online on HP Shopping, Amazon.com, Newegg, Tiger Direct, and other online stores in October, and is expected to reach brick-and-mortar stores like Office Depot, Staples, or Office Max in early 2014. The calculator will premier at $150, and every physical calculator comes with the emulator included (and teachers can request the emulator for free).

Read the full review for all the details, along with more screenshots and photos!



Source:
Hands-On with the HP Prime: Full Review from Cemetech

Less than a year ago, Cemetech (via member 0rac343) discovered the existence of the color-screen TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. In the intervening months, we learned more about the calculator, got an early version of our own for a hands-on review, and have been working hard to create tons of games and educational programs for the TI-84+CSE. Today, I am happy to add one more program to that list: Tetric A, a color-screen Tetris game for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

Tetric A is based on my Tetrizm game for the Casio Prizm. It is a full-featured Tetris game, complete with spiffy graphics, five different game modes, classic Tetris mechanics, and a high score system. You can play in standard Marathon mode, where you survive through increasingly-fast levels. You can play High Speed mode, which ups the ante by starting you on level 15. Touchdown mode gives you a board full of garbage pieces, which you must carefully clear. In Cascade mode, erasing lines can cause other lines to be created and erased, potentially leading to huge bonuses. Sadistic mode gives you all the pieces you could possibly want - except line pieces. Written in z80 assembly, Tetric A is fast, colorful, and fun.

You can download Tetric A from the link below. You might need to archive some of your larger programs, as it requires 8KB of RAM to run. No shell (like Doors CS) is required, but keep your eye out for a version of Doors CS that may be coming soon for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. And as always, keep your eyes on Cemetech for the latest and greatest TI-84+CSE software.

Download
Tetric A: Color Tetris



Source:
Tetric A: Color Tetris for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition via Cemetech

Ha, pretty cool! Will this, and the new xlib, be included in DCS8?

If such a shell comes into existence, yes. My life is not amenable to a lot of calculator projects of late.

Since the color-screen TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculator was first discovered here at Cemetech eight and a half months ago, the programming community has had mixed reactions to the device. On the plus side, we're very happy that it represents an extension of the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus-series calculator line, and hope it indicates TI's commitment to continuing the series for many years to come. In addition, its math features represent a significant improvement over the black-and-white calculators, especially for graphing and statistics, as I mentioned in my review of the calculator TI kindly sent to me. The programming community's one gripe has been that the calculator's processor and memory are nearly identical to the internals of the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, save for doubled Flash ROM memory. Nevertheless, many of us are happy to face the programming challenges presented by the new device.

In that spirit, I'm proud to present the first hybrid TI-BASIC library for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, Celtic 2 CSE. Based on Iambian Zenith's unreleased Celtic 2 code, it offers a host of program- and file-manipulation functions to TI-BASIC programmers, plus a powerful sprite routine. At the behest of tifreak8x, I re-created and re-fixed it from Iambian's latest (non-lost) source code, then added my own tweaks and features. It features the ability to read lines from programs and AppVars in RAM or Flash (archive), the ability to insert, delete, or overwrite lines in a specified program, to create a specified program and to find out how many lines there are in a BASIC program, and to output special characters into a string that is not normally storable into a string via any other method (doublequote and sto). It also contains a powerful, BASIC-compatible palletized sprite routine.

I encourage all of our TI-84+CSE-owning TI-BASIC coders to give this a try, and show off what you can do with it. I expect that a future TI-84+CSE shell (like some version of Doors CS) will contain libraries similar to these, so it makes sense to get used to them now. I also want to mention the huge debt of gratitude I owe to TIFreak8x for extensive testing as well as the thorough C2TEST program included in this file.

Download
Celtic 2 CSE



Source:
Presenting Celtic 2 CSE from Cemetech

I'm glad you are all so enthusiastic about Cemetech Contest #10! We are equally excited about the many people who posted topics today with entries. Currently under-represented: ASM programs, TI-BASIC programs, and particle forces (eg, planetary simulation or electric and magnetic fields acting on particles). As others already clarified, remember that the goal is to write an educational physics program, not necessarily a game (although some game elements will be allowed). If you make it a non-game, you won't lose points. If you're definitely going to enter, or even if you're just toying with a possible idea, be sure to post up a topic in this subforum to register your (possible) entry.

Calculators are pocket computers. That's one of the tenets underlying the calculator enthusiast community, where we enjoy pushing the limits of graphing calculators to write complex games, utilities, and programs. It follows that graphing calculators are a perfect platform on which to learn to program. Indeed, many of Cemetech's administrators are professional engineers, scientists, and academics who learned to love STEM subjects after experimenting with programming their graphing calculators. We at Cemetech want that proud tradition to continue for decades to come, as STEM skills become ever-more-important in wide swathes of jobs and hobbies. A great way to inspire people to get down and dirty with anything is to challenge them to compete, and motivate them with great prizes.

Cemetech has held nine programming competitions to date, the most recent of which challenged entrants to port popular computer programs to calculators or to modify existing programs to add new features. That contest offered fame and prestige as prizes; for this contest, we have four brand-new TI calculators as prizes, plus some smaller secret prizes that will be sent with the calculators. The topic of Cemetech Contest #10 is educational Physics programs. The rules are very simple:

• Write a program or game that teaches concrete physics skills, such as equations and problem solving. Make it as educational or game-like as you want, as long as it teaches specific physics skills.
• Your program may fall into one or both of two areas: (1) particle forces (like particles in magnetic/electric fields, or planets and orbits) or (2) projectile motion. Any program not falling into at least one of those categories will be disqualified. Post in the attached topic with any questions.
• Programs must be in TI-BASIC, Axe, or ASM. All programs will be tested on a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition running under Doors CS 7.2, so any libraries offered by Doors CS 7.2 may be used.
• Contestants may not release any code or binaries before the end of the contest, including asking for programming help publicly or privately. Violators will be disqualified.
• The contest will run for 8 weeks, ending August 7th, 2013, at 11:59:59pm Eastern Time. No late entries will be accepted.
• All contestants must maintain a topic in the Contests subforum on Cemetech, including a first post that mentions the name, programming language, and topic of the entry.
• Judging will be performed by the Cemetech administrators (all of whom are disqualified from entering). Results will be posted no later than one week after the end of the contest.
• A grading rubric will be released very soon. Entries will be graded primarily on their educational value, polish, and appeal to students. Although the focus is on education rather than gaming, educational games are allowed as long as they teach concrete physics.

I'm sure you want to hear more about the prizes. We are very proud to offer not two, not three, but four brand-new calculators. The grand prize winner will be awarded one TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, one TI-Nspire CX CAS, and additional secret prizes. The second and third place winner will each be awarded one TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and additional secret prizes. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is TI's brand-new color-screen TI-84 Plus-series calculator, and if you don't already have one, this is a great opportunity to try out its new math features and of course write new color programs and games. The TI-Nspire CX CAS is aimed at older high school and college students who need the power of a symbolic CAS, and if you win one, you'll also have an opportunity to practice your Lua skills. All participants will earn Cemetech flair in the form of signature bars and respect.

So what are you waiting for? Getting coding, inspire students to use calculator for more than math, and win some calculators!



Source:
Cemetech (http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=603)

Thanks for the article, DJ_O. Graph3DP actually helped me make this version, as the 3D rotation code I spend weeks hashing out for Graph3DP found its way into this new program. I was able to apply it to the entire lists of X, Y, and Z coordinates at once, eliminating the need to iterate to rotate points and contributing to the significant speedup over the old version.