well, this is by far the most useful app I've ever used! finally i'm not wasting time putting every setting back in place when I want to go RAM clear, I'm actually encouraging myself to do that more often now

one thing though, I can't seem to get custom fonts working with programs? if I go make a new custom font in zstart it'll find that, but it won't find any font existing as a program, archived or not.
I also setup symgraph as a part of startup for zStart, but after that, the run from home option seems to be failing ?

Are you talking about Omnicalc fonts? Those aren't perfectly compatible with zStart fonts (for meh reasons) but if you look back far enough in this thread, I believe DrDnar made an Axe program to convert them. It's at least 10 pages back though.

I came across this "bug" multiple times now:
When you turn off the calculator while you're editing an archived program (the copy of one), and zStart wants to store the edited version and GarbageCollect appears, the LCD turns off and and it doesn't react on any key presses (calc behaves like turned off, but it isn't) before you can do a GarbageCollect. You need to remove the batteries and lose the current progress which is kinda annoying
Is there someway you can prevent the calc (or its peripherals) from turning off when the program isn't saved yet?

Well that's a super specific bug. Garbage collect is sketchy as it is, and then throwing in the shutdown sequence just makes it more confusing. I'll try to figure out what I can do, but that doesn't sound easy to fix.

That is axctually a pretty awesome idea but how should it be handled? Like find promps a input, and if you input plain text instead of tokens, will it tokenize that etc?

it seems like it would be a lot easier to just insert a line wherever you are in the program, write whatever you want to find/replace on that, and then press some key combo. it wouldn't take up nearly as much space, either.

Yeah, I would think that it would search for whatever is in the clip board. You would have one combo that is strictly find, and another that is find/replace. The find would simply find, and the find/replace would find on the first press, and replace if it was sitting directly on the specific string.

Well, I made that easy enough that it might get implemented some day. Well see.

-Add a turn calc off function to zStaxe. It would quit the program then turn the calc off "completely" and "truly". I mean not an APD and not a low-battery trick, but a power down that would trigger the 8scale picture and the startup program at startup.

The only to truly turn off a calculator is to remove all four AAAs and the backup battery. The calculator requires about 70 microamps to maintain RAM contents and to be able to sense when the ON key is pressed. The OS itself uses the same "low-battery trick" you speak of. Some really old programs may not do it correctly, but I doubt that's a problem anymore. (The correct code should be located on WikiTI.)

More technical information: During a normal power-down, writing to a port configures the ASIC to enter a special low-power mode when it sees the CPU core enter the HALT state. Hardware-wise, there is no difference between the OS doing it and a RAM program or application doing it. In both cases, pressing ON issues an interrupt that terminates the HALT state, and the ASIC exits low-power mode. The CPU then continues executing instructions from where ever it left off.

So why does removing a battery when in a RAM program cause a RAM reset, but no reset happens when the OS does it? It's a bit of a long story: Disconnecting the main AAAs will cause the ASIC and the CPU to hard-reset---except for RAM, which continues to be powered from the backup battery. When power is restored, the CPU is immediately hard-reset, and the boot code boots. It sees that the OS is valid, and transfers control to the OS after initializing some hardware. Now, when the OS turns off normally or APDs, it calculates a checksum for RAM. So, after you reinsert the AAAs, the OS sees that the RAM checksum is still valid, and that RAM should not be reset.

Cool fact: The calculator boots immediately after restoring main power. The OS (or boot code, if no OS is present) checks the state of the ON key after booting; if it isn't being pressed, it immediately does a normal power-off, as mentioned above.

Also, if you remove a battery at the homescreen with the blinking cursor, the calculator actually stays on for a split second, during which time an interrupt (HW timer 2) fires. The OS, seeing the power outage, changes the RAM checksum to a special value to signal that a RAM reset should be not performed after power is restored. This behavior is activated by a particular flag, which assembly programs should not normally use due to a memory-leak issue. (Specifically, CPU control is not returned to the running program; it's just like doing JForceCmdNoChar.) Although, I suppose a custom OS could take a few microseconds to save the CPU state. Actually, that should be a zStart feature: improved RAM-reset prevention for compatible programs. (It won't work if the interrupt handler is not called, which can be either because interrupts are disabled or the current program is using a custom interrupt.)

Ok, thanks both of you for your explanations and your time

How do you enable running a program on startup?

The zHelp program that comes with zStart gives documentation of all those shortcuts on-calc.

Even those could be substantially different. They all rely heavily on OS hooks, which are not even close to guaranteed. If TI drops assembly compatibility (which they did) then there's no reason to preserve hooks either.