Official TI-Boy CSE Alpha Thread

[aeTIos]

Ah, good to hear you can connect your calc. Did it fix itself or did you have to do something?

EDIT: Saw your edit. It's perfectly fine to post a question about something that doesn't work even when you figure it out yourself minutes later.

[xervo1b]

The connection issue solved itself a few minutes later. And the i just used the software in TI-Connect to remove the app. One step closer to learning the calc.
I also managed to download Pokemon Blue and Link's Awakening later that day. Sweden time.

[Pikachu]

Does anyone else know how to get pokemon yellow working? I'm having lots of issues as it keeps on disconnecting and reconnecting 3/4 of the way done in the file transfer process. My TI-84+C SE has sufficient RAM so I have no idea why it doesn't work. I also don't want to pay just for a new silverlink cable. I've reset my RAM, software, everything. I am using TI-Boy CSE by the way.

EDIT: I got Tetris working! But still got nothing with yellow.

[Rise Do]

Figured I'd post the video I took over here, too:
Here's a video of me playing Pokemon:

The quality isn't that great, and I had to record in portrait mode, but it gets the idea across. Something I noticed, though which is evident if you watch the video the whole way through, is that it seems to slow down a bit.

Got pokemon red but I move pretty slow. Is this because of my Rom file or ram being too low?

[TIfanx1999]

It's likely because the calculator itself is slow. It has nothing to do with the Rom.
*edit* You might want to look at the readme. IIRC, there are options for frame skip.

[Eeems]

It will run slower due to emulation running slower then it actually would on a gameboy. It will be especially slow on a CSE due to the display drivers being rather slow for the colour screen. That is a hardware limitation that frame skipping will help, but it wont be perfect.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Generally, at max frame skip and half resolution I don't have much speed issues. I usually prefer a frame skip of 3 or 4 for a good balance in speed and frame rate, though, and I notice that most of the time, making the game full screen doesn't impact speed all that much.

[Ralph Worthington]

Is this still being worked on? Or is the project done?

[TIfanx1999]

This is it's home. I'd expect a release here before Ticalc, but Ticalc would probably follow shortly after. Not sure why that matters though.

[Kanesh_413]

It's awesome! The only thing that I have to say about it is that when I launched a GBC game on my calculator, it didn't even show the start screen for the game!   Just putting this out there for things to fix. I get it, it's new, and it's awesome!  :thumbsup:I just have to say that because it frustrates me, and I'm probably not the only one here who wants that fixed. Just saying! (If you didn't notice, I love emoticons )

[TIfanx1999]

If you'd actually read the very first post in this thread, it clearly states:

Let's start this off with a release of TI-Boy CSE Alpha 0.0.01! For the uninitiated, this is a Game Boy emulator for the TI-84+ C Silver Edition (Game Boy Color is not supported).

It is also mentioned in the readme file included with the download. This emulator is for Gameboy only, not Gameboy Color.

[Jack P.]

Sorry to revive a seemingly-dead thread, but this needs to get updated for 4.2. It doesn't run on Wabbit, and my actual calculator is on 4.2. Or is it that the ROM I tried (Pokemon Yellow) was strangely a .GBC file? I'll try Blue. Thanks guys.

[MOAR_CORES]

Hello everyone,

Is this still in development for the TI - 84 Plus CE? It would be awesome to see it ported onto this calculator.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Hello everybody! I've been using this generator for quite a while now and I'm quite pleased with it. Despite this, there's all the issues. They're by no means "game-breaking" and many of them have already been addressed. Speaking as a total ignorant to how the TI-84 and co. work but having read the forums, my questions are as follows:

-Is the code available publicly for this? ( I seem to vaguely recall downloading the program from a Github, but maybe I imagined it? )
-Why can't the TI-84's regular clock-keeping be used for the RTC emulation? If it can, how long would that take to implement?
-( Vain pleas and hopes of GBC support through some miracle of programming.)
-Besides frameskip and scaling, there are no optimizations a user can do for speed?
-Is it stupid to ask for a battery bar that renders over the gamescreen? ( Of all the things I asked, this seems like the most dumb. )
-Why are the graphical drivers so sluggish for the colour screen as many have pointed out? Could they be replaced?
-I've read in the original project thread that calc-to-calc communication wasn't doable because of inconsistent timing. Is this still the case?
-The sound isn't supported, does that mean the app directly skips those byte-codes? If not, why not?

Beyond that, thank you all for your hard work and for the fruits thereof. I have enjoyed them ever since I acquired my CSE. I'd like to help, but realistically I don't think I can. At very least I'd like to snoop into the inner workings of this program. Also... there's some things that you should possibly look into with hardware modding a CSE. It is apparently possible to overclock them if you have divine skill. Would that be enough to bring about GBC support or is there more to it than mere processor power?

[Iambian]

-Why are the graphical drivers so sluggish for the colour screen as many have pointed out? Could they be replaced?

When we speak of "driver" in this context, we're really talking about the combination of hardware and firmware that sits somewhere between the calculator's CPU and the actual glass. More information about the screen found in the TI-84+CSE is found here . Replacing that sort of thing is out of the question. It's generally assumed that all our programs use custom software designed to interact as directly as possible with the screen. The LCD is just much too slow to do it any other way.

Or rather, it's not that the LCD itself is slow. It's actually quite fast (as there's no need to delay between in/out), but the problem stems from three facts:
(1) The screen is a 16-bit device while the calc's CPU is 8-bit, so any and all communications require two separate read/write cycles.
(2) Every pixel must be addressed individually in each write, as opposed to groups of 8 per write in the context of monochrome.
(3) Related to the first two, there's no hardware acceleration of any type, including memory-mapping, which is often taken for granted.

Trying to update just the screen area required for the Game Boy screen alone requires 1/29th of the total CPU's time, and that's not even considering any logic whatsoever, not even any actual update logic. It's the single greatest bottleneck on the TI-84+CSE with respect to writing any decent program, and everything has to be coded around it.