You check the number of posts.
Maybe you should check the number of visits/hits too.

Because even if very few people comment a news/topic, it's still important if many people read it.


And indeed, pageviews is greater in february than in january.
No wonder with the exclusive TI-84+CSE news we shared

Very glad to see there is finally an audio solution for Ndless programs and some progress on the TI-Nspire Dock Connector!

And very glad to see that somebody has allready updated Hackspire:
http://hackspire.unsads.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware#Connector_J01_-_Dock_connector


Let's go on: we still have a little more than 20 pins to identify!

In a previous news, the first performance test of the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition made it appear as an extremely slow device.
But this test was comparing it with a TI-83 Plus that has a different CPU clock and which is not weakened by the MathPrint mode. When we compare things, we must try to only change one parameter at a time.

Later on, we confirmed this sluggish behaviour by only looking at the menu display time.

However the fist 84C ASM game, by Kerm Martian showed very correct performances.


All this seems to be a little blurry and weirdly contradictory, so let's test the performances of text output function in TI-Basic on the text screen :

We'll be thus testing the performances of:

• TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, MathPrint mode
  
• TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, Classic mode
  
• TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, MathPrint mode
  
• TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, Classic mode
  
• TI-83 Plus.fr (2008, Classic mode)

Let's start with a simple loop displaying the integers from 1 to 500, with the Disp instruction.

Here are the results:

• 1st) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Classic Mode (0min33s)
  
• 2nd) TI-83 Plus.fr (0min35s)
  
• 3rd) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition MathPrint Mode (1min53s)
  
• 4th) TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Classic Mode (2min14s)
  
• 5th) TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition MathPrint Mode (2min33s)

So:

• On this program, the Classic TI-84 Plus, despite its 2x faster 15MHz CPU, has similar performances to the TI-83 Plus with its little 6MHz CPU.
• When enabling the MathPrint mode, as already known since the 2.55MP OS release, the TI-84 Plus becomes 2.5x slower but the TI-84 Plus C only slows down by 14%.
• In Classic mode, the TI-84 Plus C is 4x slower than the 84 Plus.
• But in MathPrint mode, the 84 Plus C is only slowed down by 35% more than the 84 Plus. Would the slowness issues in MathPrint mode be fixed ? Or is it the overall slowness of that beast that's "hiding" it ?

Anyway, the 84 Plus C, whether in Classic or MathPrint mode, still is at the end of the rankings. The vertical scrolling needs a full-screen refresh, which is now slow for 16-bit colors for the little z80 CPU that does that in about 1 second for 2 new lines...

But even if it comes last, we could in theory have expected something like 16x slower than a 84+, since it's going from 1 to 16-bit colors, which is far from being the case. :o



Let's go on and try to find these optimizations with a 2nd test, but using the Output instruction. We now have no more vertical scrolling.

Here are the results:

• 1st) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Classic Mode (3s)
  
• 2nd) TI-83 Plus.fr (5-6s)
  
• 3rd) TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Classic & MathPrint Mode (7-8s)
  
• 4th) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition MathPrint Mode (16s)

So:

• On this program, the 84 Plus in Classic mode still gets first.
• The TI-83 Plus is almost twice as slow, which is coherent.
• With MathPrint enabled, the TI-84 Plus is also 2.5x slower, but the TI-84 Plus C seems not to be slowed down at all ! :D
• The TI-84 Plus C is then 2.5x slower than the TI-84 Plus in Classic mode, but 2x faster than the TI-84 Plus in MathPrint!

This confirms the fact that optimizations were done, otherwise the 84 Plus C would still have been last.
More precisely, KermMartian from Cemetech discovered that contrary to the other calculators, theTI-84 Plus C does not necessarily refresh all the screen, but can limit the refresh to a specific area of the screen. An optimization perfectly fitted for our test !



In conclusion, the TI-84 Plus C is not, in my opinion, the catastrophe that some websites try to present.

It is clear that it isn't fitted for games needing a full-screen refresh, like games using horizontal/vertical scrolling, emulators, or Doom-likes.

But on other types of games, it is perfectly capable of doing even better than its predecessors and moreover in color, especially since most users stay with the latest OS with MathPrint enabled (by default), which is the now-optimized configuration !






Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11309&lang=en

Hi,

Made a speed test for Disp and Output instructions.


Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11309

Just remember about TI's license:
"This Agreement will immediately terminate if you fail to comply with its terms. Upon termination of this Agreement, you agree to return or destroy the original package and all whole or partial copies of the Program in your possession and so certify in writing to TI."

No problem!
If you want to destroy your TI-Nspire permanently, just ask me...
And you might ask Brandon to permanently brick your TI-z80 Flash.

I also wonder how really slow it is to scroll through a large program (for example, can you quit with ON then Goto to see how long it takes to scroll through code?), now that we can see that the emulator seems slower than the real calc?

I allready did that as I've started porting some of my huge math programs...
Seriously, while the calculator scrolls your program to the line on which the error/break occured, you can go doing something else...
Same speed as the TI-Basic performance test from ticalc.org: it scrolls by less than 2 text lines per second...

We'll have to develop TI-Basic programs on emulators...
Hm sorry, I forgot it was forbidden now!

In a previous news we started to address the performance of the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition with ticalc.org.

But before even speaking of the TI-Basic and asm performance, let's have a look at the system menus behaviour.



Firstly the MODE menu. Its display was almost instantaneous on the TI-83 Plus. It was a little slowed down on the the faster TI-84 Plus because of the use of small font.

Now on TI-84 Plus Silver Edition C it needs almost one second to display! :O
Its display is so slow that it becomes perfectly feasible to take a photo with half the menu:



Now for the system menus using the large font.
Navigating through those menus was instantaneous on the old TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus. But now on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition we see clearly see the refresh from top to bottom.

This means in particular that we can not use the calculator on the same typing speed as the old calculators. We must wait until the screen refresh is completed, or some keypresses are going to be ignored.

For example in the video below, I press four times the right arrow at the same speed on TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition to navigate the menus. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ignores half of my keypresses! :O

I admit that it is quite painful when using the TI-Basic editor in insert mode or when you are at the bottom of the screen, but maybe it's because I'm too accustomed to previous TI-z80 models and a new user wouldn't mind?



If there is no way to improve this speed, it would be nice to create a buffer capable of storing a list of unhandled keypresses, which will have to be processed in order later, once the cpu is available again - it allready existed in the early 1990s on the HP-48 calculators.






Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11302&lang=en