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Messages - gbl08ma

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Casio Calculators / Re: A call to Prizm owners
« on: December 15, 2014, 12:25:41 pm »
Picture Plot 01.01 was released with OS 02.00, so there's no way it could come on calculators with OS 01.01. I don't know if calculators that come with OS 02.00 pre-installed have the latest version of the add-ins installed or not.

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Casio Calculators / Re: A call to Prizm owners
« on: December 12, 2014, 04:54:50 pm »
Original OS version: 01.00

Are you sure the original OS version was 01.00? Because on https://www.omnimaga.org/casio-prizm/your-calculator-serial-number/ you said it was 01.01. The difference is quite important to me, as one of the things I want to figure out is approximately how many calculators got out with 01.00.

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Casio Calculators / A call to Prizm owners
« on: December 11, 2014, 05:36:30 pm »
Hello everyone. I'm trying to collect some interesting statistics on Casio Prizm calculators, more specifically:
 - Approximate values for how many of these calculators exist, and how many are usually produced per month;
 - Whether the rate of production has been increasing or decreasing;
 - How long, on average, it takes for a calculator to be bought after being built;
 - Approximate values for how many calculators are sold by country/website;
 - What OS version the calculators run and what is/was the preloaded version;
 - How many calculators exist with each hardware revision, and figure out when each revision was introduced, etc.

To calculate these values, I'm collecting product IDs of fx-CG 10 and 20 models (product IDs, perhaps more commonly known as "serial numbers", even though on the Prizm they are not really serial). These are the sequences of 15 characters printed on the small white sticker on the back of the calculator, along with a barcode, that start with 755.

The first two points should be possible to figure out as long as one has a big enough sample of product IDs. This is because the ID contains the month and year of production, along with the serial number for the month (see more details here: http://prizm.cemetech.net/index.php/Product_ID_Information ).
The other points can be a little harder to obtain, but not impossible. It would depend on how much information people have and are willing to share. It's understandable that not everyone is willing to open their calculator to know the hardware revision, for example. Things like the installed OS version or the country where the calc was purchased are easier to remember, but I understand that not everyone is willing to share them (if the project is successful, though, it could be possible to make correlations based on people who shared such information).

To collect the necessary data, tny. internet media has built this website: http://prizmid.tny.im/ It is where statistics will be published once we have enough entries for a proper analysis.

It takes less than five minutes (I mean, really. Unless the product ID has become unreadable and you need some more effort to read it) to submit a product ID. Everything is explained on the website.

Prizm Product ID survey

FAQ (in addition to the one which is on the website):

Q: Turns out my product ID had already been submitted, but I never visited this website before?
A: I already submitted the product IDs I could find on this thread: https://www.omnimaga.org/casio-prizm/your-calculator-serial-number/ , along with the preloaded OS version when one was published. If you have more information to add, just re-submit the product ID with more information (make sure to select the correct preloaded OS version, so no information is lost).

Q: I have more than one Prizm...
A: You can submit them all if you wish.

Q: I have one/two/three/... broken Prizm(s). Should I participate?
A: Yes, you can submit all of them if you wish; "current OS version" would mean "OS version it had installed when it broke". Make sure to put "broken", "dead" or something like that in the comments field, in case I decide to exclude those from some statistics.

Q: Is it dangerous/does it bring any problem to share the product ID?
A: As far as I know, no. So far, Casio hasn't asked for the product ID for anything (it's not like with some TI calculators where you need it for a software license or something like that, not sure) and the product ID alone doesn't contain any personal information; depending on the results of the analysis, it could become possible to know, in a not very precise manner, where the calculator was bought (in terms of country/website), but I doubt the information collected will allow for that.

Q: The sticker on mine wore out, is there any way to know the ID?
A: No, as far as I know.

If you have any more questions or concerns, do not hesitate to ask, either here or through the email address listed on the website.

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Casio Calculators / Re: Secret debug menu
« on: February 05, 2014, 05:07:12 pm »
2) As soon as the popup window appears*, quickly type in: 5963

There's not much point in doing it, but this is also reproducible when calling the diagnostics mode from Insight. After answering F1 on Insight's prompt, quickly press 5963 (if using the emulator, you should use the mouse to click on the keys). Note how it has a timeout, if you don't press another key in the sequence quickly, it reboots. Verified on the 1.02 emulator.

Now, more importantly... are there any differences between this test mode and the one available through the syscall? The syscall takes a parameter; has its meaning been revealed yet? And something that has kept me wondering for months and may be related to the high number of Prizms dying: is there something that permanently changes in the system as soon as the test or diagnostic modes are accessed (like, some bit set in flash)?

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Casio Calculators / Re: Any FX-cg10/20 PNG->3-bit g3p converter?
« on: February 01, 2014, 05:06:22 pm »
Huge confusion in there...

The CG-10 supports full and 8-color images, just like the CG-20. The only difference is that the CG-10 will only read g3p files "Provided by CASIO" or created on-calc with the screen capture function.

The official Casio converter will always generate images in full-color which only work on the CG-20, so definitely not what you're looking for. You can create a g3p with any content by saving an image as non-progressive JPEG and viewing it on-calc with my image viewer, then capturing the screen while the picture is shown (you can save the jpg with 100% quality and it will look the same as if it was a PNG). While this will work, it will only create full-color images, so not quite what you're after. I think that is the closest you can get to your objective, with the currently available tools.
AFAIK the only way to create 3-bit color images is to capture the screen while it is in 3-bit mode.

Work related to reverse-engineering understanding the g3p file format was halted some years ago when discussions on this forum expressed the concern that Casio could start to actively block 3rd-party code in their calculators (a-la-TI), if people circumvented the restrictions of the CG-10 model. The same arguments almost convinced me to not release my image viewer, but I ended up doing it, and so far, of all the add-ins I made, it's the one with most downloads. Casio did nothing about it (and there have been many OS updates after it). More recently, I also released a math engine port with symbolic functions (so much to avoid saying that three-letter acronym), and yet again nothing was done about it. Even more recently, Casio Education's official Twitter feed (@CasioPrizm) retweeted two tweets about custom add-ins (my Utilities add-in and then KermM's Graph3DP). So I think we could have done everything we wanted to the g3p file format, that nothing special would have happened. But now, it's probably too late, I think the interest of the calculator hacking community around the Prizm has pretty much vanished (at least for the expert users who could actually reverse-engineer anything), and the needs of existing Prizm users have been dealt with, either with the official g3p converter (hint: there's a serial somewhere on the internet) in the case of the CG-20, or with my JPEG image viewer which works on both models (download: http://tny.im/ivcp ).

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