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Free, Open Source OS For TI Calculators
nicklaszlo writes "TICalc.org announced yesterday that Patrick Pelisier has released a new beta OS, called PedroM, for the TI-89 and TI-92+ under the General Public License. Here is the source and binary. This is the first time a TI calculator has been free of proprietary software. The OS has 32 commands and backward compatibility for assembly programs. You can get a Windows/PC emulator of both calculators, for those who don't have either calculator, or don't want to risk their real system."
I don't use my Ti-92+ in school as a calculator any more anyway (not many calculus teachers want you using any electronic devices at all) so this gives me something to do with it. 2mb rom, m68k 10mhz processor, link port: If we could get a graphical tool kit and a C toolchain it might be possible to make something roughly as capable as one of the original Mac or Lisa. Not powerful, but useful for note taking, tetris, and doing some simple calculations on the side - and has even more geek-factor than taking notes on a palm pilot + fold out keyboard or pocketpc running linux.
...is a free OS for my HP48.
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Collection of funny Saddam photos: here
(disclaimer: I don't have a TI-89, and I haven't messed with the emulator)
It looks like a cool interface, but I have a few questions
1) the screenshot I saw made looked like some kind of pseudo unix shell. This is all fine and good with a normal computer, but with a graphing calc, where you have no QWERTY keyboard, a GUI is much faster. Is one available for this OS, or do we have do do everything pecking keys in alpha mode?
2) having games on a graphing calculator is cool for when boredom strikes, but the main reason for investing in a graphing calculator, particularly a high-end one like the TI-89 is its ability to do advanced math functions. are these still available, or will they have to be developed third party? TI put a large number of very complicated math functions into their OS, and the usefulness of this OS would be severely limited if these functions were not available or had to be re-implemented.
At any rate, this looks like an interesting project, and they seem to have made some good progress.
Let's make a difference
In the same vein, if one really wants to make their 89/92+ useful, I recommend this small utility. I bet PedroM can't touch it.
The ti89 will probably never run linux, or any non-embed OS. The 2mb (or so) flash are a bit short to run linux (or netbsd, which is more portable), but you could at least get the bootup messages.
However, the ti89, which has a m68k, lacks an MMU, so it will be probably very difficult to run a proper OS (IMHO would some sort of virtualizer too complicated).
On the other hand, I feel the guy's idea to write a new OS quite nice. It would be also nice to port some open source CAS to the calc, and, for example, make it use RPN.
I would love to trade my 48GX (whose software I like best) with an ti89 (whose hardware rules) (49g+ is nice, but the screen is still inferior).
How about a Lisp (well, subset thereof, of course) machine implemented on a calculator? A Lisp interpreter could feasibly be much faster and more powerful than TI-BASIC, without making basic calculations any harder than on a HP48. :)
Yeah, it will, but there's already pressure on TI to improve their calculators. This came in the form of HP re-entering the graphing calculator market with several new calculators of their own including one which is far more powerful than any other calculator today. This isn't a concern for TI to make a better product, just because they don't charge for upgrades to the AMS (and aren't necessarily losing money if you switch away), because TI still produces the hardware, and because if you want the powerful math features of the TI-89 you still need to use the official AMS.
Why the fuck do we always see all of the goddamned "This isn't useful to me," posts when brand-new, alpha-stage OSS projects open up? Dumbass--IF YOU CAN'T SEE A USE FOR THIS PROJECT YET, IT OBVIOUSLY ISN'T MEANT FOR YOU YET!!
What the fuck would you have done with Apache 0.0.1? Or perhaps even a pre-1.0 version of Linux? Nothing, that's what--because you were not a developer on those projects. But there are many, MANY people who did see value in using those early releases, primitive as they were.
Now, do you think, maybe (just maybe!), that there are developers who think that this *might someday*, with a lot more work and development, turn into a really useful project? Maybe not ever exactly as useful as the proprietary OS, but perhaps with different purposes, better at some things and worse at others?
You're a turd or a troll if you say that it's stupid to contribute to a project because YOU can't think of a potential future use for a more highly developed version. Yes, YOU, sir, are The Colloquial Deuce, unless IHBT.
Almost every single fucking OSS project that I use today, including Apache, Linux, Perl, Samba, and many more, started out as one of these "useless" projects. Want a GREAT example of this? Check out Familiar Linux on the iPAQ. A year ago, I would have had no use whatsoever because it wasn't stable or refined enough. Today, I have dozens of uses for the current version, and I contribute packages to it. But some of my co-workers have no use for it still--they might want to try it in another year, when the 1.0 comes out. And you know, there are STILL people who tell me that Linux on the iPAQ is useless, and I'm wasting my time with it, while I'm billing $250 an hour plus $75 for every hour that the iPAQ runs on a client job.
But back in grade 10 high school, a close friend of mine actually wrote a GUI Windows-like interface for the TI-83 calculator. It included start-menu style popup menus, Notepad application, etc. Super-crazy.
These TI's have Z80 processors in them, anyone who knows Z80 assember can pull off some pretty amazing shit.
If you install it, the calculator no longer does math.
Kinda defeats the purpose of having a calculator, no?
Now if someone ported the yacas engine to it, and made it similar to the original interface, that would be something!
I'm not going to put an alternative OS on my calculator that just plays games, when I can have a gameboy advance for $100 and get color too!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Anyways, this sort of thing bypasses TI's restrictions on what assembly programs can do.
So does the TICT exepack system and program starters like Super Start, without losing the "calculator" part of the calculator.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Oh wait, there is, albeit in a suboptimal state.
Now, would please somebody write a Free clean-room reimplementation of Symbolics Genera, so that the FLOSS community can catch up with the operating system state of the art of the 80ies?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
A serious question here :
I almost feel like the spanish guy from the Princess Bride. "You use that word so much, I do not think it means what you think it means."
What really defines software as proprietary?
If a software company allows you to view the source does it suddenly become non-proprietary?
Is non-proprietary software these days defined solely by the GNU license?
Though PedroM has only been available for under a week now (publicly), I've already written the first piece of software designed for it. The program, MLib, is a collection of OS extensions that allow you to do a lot more with PedroM than you can with the OS alone. You can find MLib for the TI-89 at this page, and for the TI-92+ at this page. Enjoy!
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.
Another problem that I've seen in my school district is that ALL of the books now are "TI-83 enhanced" or some such thing like that, where many of the lessons involve learning how to do things specifically on the TI-83/+. It makes the calculators a staple around the school, but it would make conversion to a different calculator a bitch. It would probably be at least $1 million spent total, from all the students buying new calculators, the school system buying new class sets of calculators, and the school system getting books that didn't give you instructions on how to make the graphs on the TI-83.
Basically, TI has the market on high school cornered, and there's not much I see HP being able to do about it.
Since I burned my mod points this morning I'll burn some karma... Amen Brother
There's always been 2 sides to the TI vs. HP debate but IMO real geeks have always used HP calculators. We know they are superior to the TI riff raff. Always have been. (Here is where I was going to write "Always will be", but I don't know if that's necessarily true since HP seems to have largely given up). No one who knows their way around an RPN HP ever lost a competition involving speed, clarity of thought or lapses of logic to a TI nerd. That was the key difference. HP guys were Geeks but the TI boys were only nerds. Parenthesis. Yikes. Might as well program in Visual Basic.
RPN is a feature unique to HP calculators, though. I've never come across another calculator that used it. There's a third party program for the TI-89/92 that implements it, but it doesn't integrate as seamlessly as it does in HP's calculators. Once you get used to RPN, it's a lot more efficient than algebraic.