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Overclocking Calculators?

Posted by michael on from the asymptotic-growth dept.

Klar writes "If you're looking for something new to prove your tech prowess, Richard Piotter has a great how to on overclocking Texas Instruments graphing calculators. You can actually double the cpu speed, which is noticeable when graphing complex functions."

18 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Cheating by fembots · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Will students be caught cheating with these overclocked calculators?

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
  2. Re:The Point? by enosys · · Score: 2, Interesting
    These calculators can do more complex operations like graphing and iterative numerical solving. These would benefit from overclocking.

    They can also run interpreted and assembler programs. These would also run faster, but that's not necessarily a good thing because many are games that may become too fast and unplayable.

  3. Yes, graphing complex functions quicker by jj110888 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i'm sure the fact that theres more games then math programs in ticalc.org's asm sections will tell you what the extra cycles would be used for......

  4. Re:Not only is it faster by Aero+Leviathan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, just like a Pentium II!

    --
    ~ Aero
  5. Re:Sooo.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As well as yesterday's hack a day...

  6. TI long in tooth? by cgenman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What happened to graphing calculator development? While I was in High School there was this burst of activity with the TI line, with frequent new models and upgrades. And then they stalled. And stymed. I got a TI-92 Plus my senior year in High School, and that has stayed TI's top-of-the-line ever since. It's like they've done zero development for the past ten years. You can get full color-screen Game Boy Advances with hardware far in advance of what you would find in a TI for about 100 dollars less, yet you have to use hardware trickery to fake greyscale on these dinosaurs. Their Ancient. Years after I've graduated college, they're still the best you can get. Now they're called the Voyage 200, but they're still the same 68000 - based calc with very similar limitations.

    Where is somebody to steal TI's crown? Somebody has to recognize the power of full-color 3D graphics in mathematics. Doesn't anyone want the market TI has abandoned?

    --
    The ______ Agenda
    1. Re:TI long in tooth? by jotux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      the voyage 200 is like half the size/weight, and has 2.7mb of flash memory. It's 12mhz, instead of 10 like the 92+...which isn't much of a difference but still. They've also just realeased the titanium editions, and you've kinda neglected all the HP calculators....which in reality are much more powerful than the TI's anyways.

      When it comes down to it, who really wants a full color 3d calculator? It would basically have the performance of a PDA, and the same battery life. I can go about 10 months on new batteries with my v200, using it every other day. ...even the best PDA running simple apps could never compare to that.

    2. Re:TI long in tooth? by Shawndeisi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unfortunately, TI seems to have the market cornered with their non-feature-rich calculators. The more features you add, the less people will want them. This is inverse to what you would think, but it due to one large reason: "Education" Teachers wouldn't permit calcs that could be used as a game boy. Standardized testing wouldn't allow calcs with large memory and a notes program. It's all BS, but that's another comment.

  7. Re:did in 80's with HP 41C by hudsucker · · Score: 2, Interesting
    My HP 41C was overclocked in around 1984 or so, in the US. There was a company that sold the upgrade kit. It doesn't have a magnetic switch; it is controlled through a little tiny push button that is installed where the power plug opening is for the rechargeable battery pack option.

    I think it is more than 2x, though. I thought it was 4x, but I could be wrong.

    The overclock mode works great, except when you try to print through the IR port.

  8. Re:It's not just TI calcs that can be OC'd. by allanc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Only works on the HP49g+, not the HP49g or the HP48 series.

    Works really well, though. I enjoy the fact that I can overclock my calculator--which is already faster than the first Unix workstation I ever owned--so I can do my simple addition, multiplication, and subtraction problems at blazing fast speed!

  9. Re:Sooo.... by ottothecow · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Well none of it is really new considering there were plenty of instructions when I got my 83+ in 7th grade. They even prompted me to try to overclock a little 4function calculator...it kind of worked; the screen was sometimes a little garbled but the big square roots were slightly faster.

    Not that I would do something like this to my beautiful TI-89...its amazingly difficult to find one in a store but I really dont like the feel of the titanium's shape or buttons (especially the arrow keys).

    Boo TI for getting rid of the bombproof black case in exchange for changable faceplates!

    --
    Bottles.
  10. Re:did in 80's with HP 41C by somewhere+in+AU · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actual overclocking rate varied in actual speedup vs reliability. (nothing new under the sun!)

    2x was rock solid across several models and I recall other members getting 2.something before straying into areas of unreliability above that.

    Of course we "only" had air cooled models so perhaps some mad scandinavian with -40c temps managed 4x but with the thick gloves necessary perhaps was never able to actually press the little black buttons to use at that speed! ;-)

    Alex.

  11. True story by tepples · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Once I wrote a passable Tetris clone in TI BASIC to waste my spare time in class. Then I ported it to QBasic, and it started running at acceptable speeds even on an old-ass 8088. Then I turned it into C and made it run inside a graphical environment; this formed part of freepuzzlearena. Years later, I added a hallucinogen-simulating graphic distortion layer, first for the PC and then for the Game Boy Advance, resulting in TOD.

  12. Sweet Zombie Jesus! by laodamas · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Some information in this article is at least 12 years old. I remember overclocking my own TI-85, and then several friend's TI-85s in middle school. We then had fun writing benchmarking software that measured speed and how much error was introduced into mathmatical operations in both Basic and ASM (yay zshell!). No wonder I never had a date before HS graduation. I also installed the switch doodad under the battery cover so that I could switch to the original clock frequency when too much error was introduced around the 10e-6 and lower digits. Thank god I did not destroy any TI-85 PC boards with my $5 RadioShack Iron and my non-ESD protected work area. Anyway, the TI-85 uses a RC resonator to clock the CPU. When a smaller cap (1pf in this case) is substituted for the original, the RC constant becomes roughly 150% faster (cap takes less time to charge) which increases the overall speed of the voltage rise. This allowed me to build a 15MHz TI-85 that mostly worked. Incidentally the use of an RC resonator is why the calculator gets slower when the battery starts to sag-- apparently TI was too cheap to spring for a $0.20 quartz crystal.

    Anyway, the TI-85 uses a RC resonator to clock the CPU. When a smaller cap (1pf in this case) is substituted for the original, the RC constant becomes roughly 150% faster (cap takes less time to charge) which increases the overall speed of the circuit. This allowed me to have a 15MHz TI-85 that mostly worked. Incidentally the use of an RC resonator is why the calculator gets slower when the battery starts to sag. Apparently TI was too cheap to use a $0.20 quartz crystal.

  13. No kidding. by raygundan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago. (not that I'm incredibly old, but being ten years behind the curve is spectacular even for slashdot) You could overclock a TI-85 pretty easily, although it wasn't really necessary. The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly. It was the ultimate time-waster: a gameboy that your teachers allowed in class. TI even caught on later that their overflow bug had become a feature, and built in access to run assembly code on the TI-86.

    There were some truly great games written, too. A few (Sqrxz comes to mind) even eventually made the leap to the gameboy.

    1. Re:No kidding. by afidel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually there were times when an overclocked Ti-89 would have been quite usefull to me, mostly when doing 3D plots. Plotting a series of partial differentials and rotating them in 3D was quite slow on the 89, on the order of a few seconds per frame. I eventually ran the Ti-89 firmware in an emulator on my laptop which gave ~5x normal performance and the graphing was quite nice at those speeds. Of course then I lost the great input interface, no laptop will ever compare with a dedicated graphing calculator for ease of input for mathematical equations.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:No kidding. by punkrockguy318 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, i'm a highschool student now.. There's an application out now (MirageOS) that can run ASM games and advanced BASIC games. That's the only way I got through Health class, heh. The big games they play now include a mario3 clone, megaman clone, pheonix 3 (space invader like game), pacman, zelda clone, and lots more. It's getting serious. Unfortunately, some of the teachers are catching on. But I'm sneaky :-P

  14. Re:This isn't new... by ari_j · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I blame michael. Right now on the front page, there are 10 michael stories and 5 non-micheael stories. Most of the stories that have been pushed off the front page were michael stories, too, including one that was posted on Snopes as an urban legend long before it was submitted here. If he has that much time on his hands, he may not have enough time to actually fact-check anything, but it'd be really nice if he could put in the effort to time-check articles so make sure they're less than 4 years old before they are deemed front-page-worthy "news."