Hmm, I wouldn't think so.  What seems to happen in this case is that the app gets compiled as usual, it just gets marked as deleted right away (so it doesn't show up in the apps menu, and as soon as you try to run another app, the OS will start defragmenting.)

Following up... This seems not to be an issue on 84+es at all, and may not be an issue on newer 83+es either.  I don't really know very much about the internals of that part of the OS, and the more I look at it the weirder it gets.  I'm not sure when exactly these status bits are supposed to be set or cleared in normal operation; the one thing I can say for sure is that if the bit is set, the app isn't considered valid and will end up getting deleted.  I think maybe this was an old security measure that TI decided to stop using, or maybe it was never fully implemented to begin with.

It is possible, I guess, that you have something weird going on in the certificate page.  If you send me a copy I could take a look - I think BrandonW has tools for backing up and restoring the certificate.

Edit: Yes, he does: http://www.brandonw.net/calcstuff/certtools.zip

Well, that's a pretty straightforward program.  Perhaps it's Brandon's unlocking technique that your calculator doesn't like (I believe Axe uses the same technique.)  You could try this version instead.

It looks fine to me.  Though, it looks like you probably would run into the apps-getting-deleted issue I was talking about, if you could actually get Axe to compile apps.

But it sounds to me like for whatever reason, the Flash unlocking code isn't working correctly.  The problem is, the way Brandon's method works involves sending some invalid commands to the Flash chip, and different chips may respond differently.  The method used in the program I posted above should be somewhat more robust, although I haven't tested it on all the possible platforms yet.

(By the way, my 83+ BE is even older - 1199A - and Brandon's method seems to work fine.  So, who knows.)

It says it's from China.

Bump!

Here is the first version of my on-calculator app signer.  The name was kind of inevitable, following the grand tradition of silly names for third-party app signing tools.

I've tested this with a number of different configurations, in emulators and on real calculators, but I can't test everything.  So please try it out and let me know if it works (i.e., after signing an application, can you then send it to another calculator?)  You should also, of course, let me know if it crashes and wipes out all your programs.

It should be mentioned that this program currently does not work on "Chameleonized" calculators.

Quigibo, if you're reading this, you should take a look at the example code (example.asm) which is included in the package.  It shows how to set the expiration count and app-installed bit for a newly installed app.  Anyone else who's interested in compiling apps on the calculator may want to have a look at it, too.

(Trying again...)

Yes, it should work for multi-page apps.

Computing the MD5 hash takes about 4 seconds per page on an 83+ BE, 1 second per page on an SE or 84+.  After that it takes about 50 seconds on a BE, or 20 seconds on an SE, to compute the signature.

Yeah, BrandonW wrote a program to re-sign the calculator OS (not apps, but it's a similar amount of work); I don't remember offhand how long that program was supposed to take, but it was somewhere on the order of 10-20 minutes.  Anyway, that program wasn't very optimized.