TI Calculators Play Movies

ipapusha writes "TI Calculator enthusiasts rejoice. A few weeks ago, Dan Englender released a new flash application usb8x. Usb8x is a driver that interfaces with the On-the-Go USB port in the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It is designed to be used by other programmers to create drivers for a variety of USB peripherals, including a keyboard and mouse. Already, ticalc.org's own Michael Vincent has interfaced his Lexar JumpDrive to play The Matrix's famous lobby scene. (mirror) ."

Comments

Another mirror if necessary

[XaXXon]

Here's another mirror if necessary:

http://xaxxon.slackworks.com/2005-08-16-usb.wmv

Obg.

[deutschemonte]

Yeah, but does it run linux?

*Dodges Tomato*

Re:Obg.

[Script_God]

The 83+ Silver and 84+ Silver have 2MB of ROM, and 128 KB of RAM, all done via page swapping in a 64KB address space. To get technical, $0000 to $3999 are fixed on ROM page 0, two of the remaining 16KB chunks can be mapped to any of the RAM or ROM pages, and the last 16KB chunk can be mapped to any of the RAM pages (can't do ROM as this is where the stack is; hardware prevents it anyway). It *might* be possible to run linux, but it wouldn't be very practical unless you build USB Mass Storage drivers into it (and that would restrict it to the 84+ only). You know, that's a project idea...

I must be old.

[GreatBunzinni]

I must be old. I remember the time where calculators were used to do calculations and even plotting a nice graphic of a function.

Re:I must be old.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are old. Nowadays you can play violent video games on them which leads to you being violent. So I guess you could say that nowadays, using calculators leads to violence.

Re:I must be old.

[superyanthrax]

They still do. It's just that they have much more features now and that the original purpose of a graphing calculator has been obscured. Now for most they are either cheating implements or a glorified Gameboy. Honestly, for mathematical applications I'd rather use Mathematica, because I'd rather have my 2.66 GHz P4 crunch numbers rather than a Motorola 68000 10 MHz processor (this is the processor on a TI-89).

Re:I must be old.

[Anonymous Coward]

*gasp*

Then we must BAN MATH IN SCHOOLS!

Won't somebody THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!?!?

Re:I must be old.

[navyjeff]

I must be old. I remember the time where calculators were used to do calculations and even plotting a nice graphic of a function.

I must be ancient. I remember a time when calculators were used to do calculations and graphs were done point-by-point on graph paper. It's much harder to fudge a calculator graph.

Of course, I had a calculator that was so old that it had red LEDs for the display. Occasionally I had to smack it against the table to make the display work properly. My friends called it "Slappy". Who needs violent games when you have a calculator like that?

Re:I must be old.

[freitasm]

Yes... Calculators are Weapons of Math Instruction.

Re:I must be old.

[dj245]

Real engineers use HP calcs. I love mine. The TI's are standardized in schools, however, so thats what most people are used to. I wouldn't be surprised it there was a bit of secret lobbying and lunch-buying going on the back rooms of school administrations.

Re:I must be old.

[Repton]

There is some truth to that --- however, a good calculator, that fits in your hand, and has all the calculator functions available as keypresses, can still be more efficient than your laptop+CAS..

Re:I must be old.

[thatnerdguy]

from that page, a link to a new calc being developed:
http://www.hpcalc.org/qonos.php

eCos, running in 512KB SRAM and providing one month of battery life
Linux, running in 64MB of SDRAM and providing considerably more than a day of battery life
A day of battery life??

Re:I must be old.

[BrokenHalo]

I am old.

Which might be why I always tend to be saddened by the disproportionate amount of activity in the games section of ticalc.org by comparison with the more useful projects.

Re:I must be old.

[AnyoneEB]

Wikipedia to the rescue. The TI-89 had two hardware versions (three if you count the titantium). HW1 had a 10 MHz processor. HW2 and HW3 (titanium) have a 12 MHz processor. HW1 and HW2 appear identical, except they show a different version number on the about screen ([F1]+[A]).

almost obligatory...

[heeeraldo]

I'd ask if it'd run OSX86, but there's way too many buttons. Maybe if it had a scroll ball, though.

old school

[Madd Scientist]

i still remember getting one of the first external hard drives for the TI-85. some home grown kit with zshell drivers. it was awesome.

needs color

[Romancer]

so what calculating functions would need color graphics? like the code editing software that automatically colors tags and modules, could there be a benifit to a color display in high end calculator. Aside from playing movies that is. :)

Re:needs color

[blueadept1]

Why do you need colour if all you're going to do is watch porn on your calculator.

My god the ultimate nerd activity. I am a GENIUS!

In other news

[superpulpsicle]

Student was expelled from school when he accidentally played loud porn in a classroom during an exam.

Just Because You Can

[PepeGSay]

Some things clearly must be done... just because you can.

Re:Just Because You Can

[ScrewMaster]

Yes. Because, otherwise why would dogs lick their ... oh, never mind.

my EYES!!!

[John.P.Jones]

It looks more like the Matrix than the Matrix...

What a pity

[Anonymous Coward]

that this was one on a TI. It would have been much cooler on a HP. Still a nice hack though.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you TI fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my calculator (a TI-89) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to invert a 7 by 7 matrix. 20 minutes. At home, on my HP48 running at 4 Mhz, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this TI, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this matrix inversion, The calculator will not work. It has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various TI calculators, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a TI that has run faster than its HP counterpart, despite the TI's faster chip architecture. My Casio FX-100 runs faster than this 12 Mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the TI is a superior machine.

TI addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use TI calculators over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:What a pity

[Doppler00]

Okay, the REASON it is probably taking 20 minutes is because you are probably asking the calculator to invert a matrix _symbolically_ which by all means will take almost forever. I just executed randMat(7,7)^-1 and it took no more than 5 seconds. Make sure the calculator is in approximate mode (or diamond Enter) if you're just interested in floating point numbers. What type of matrix are you trying to invert anyway that it takes even 2 minutes on a hand held calculator? If you're doing that you're wasting your time (and calculator batteries) and you should be using an appropriate math package on a PC.

I like the TI-89 because it's easy to use and supports symbolic math. But to be honest with you, Texas Instruments has done absolutely NOTHING to upgrade the hardware to something modern. Oh yes, they think people will just keep buying their 1995 dated technology.

Come on! We have Gameboy's with color screens with more horespower than any of these calculators! It's pathetic that there are no new calculators of any significance being released now.

Re:What a pity

[peawee03]

TI is pushed *hard* in schools. You get an HP, and when going to try to explain something to a teacher, they'll look at you like you've grown a 2nd head when you start punching in RPN. Especially the younger generation of teachers coming up that were raised on TI.

Also, have you looked at a modern high school math textbook? The ones I used were designed to be used with a TI grapher. Down to not discussing what you were doing, but just giving button pressing sequences.

I use Mathmatica myself nowadays, but in high school, I needed the TI because that's what the classwork wanted.

AWSOME

[Quick Sick Nick]

*Throws out DVD Player and Laptop*

I don't need these anymore! I've got my TI-84!

Dithering

[Detritus]

The dithering looks like crap. My old HP-49G supports grayscale, what about TI calculators?

Hrm, no greyscale?

[keesh]

The ti86 has an interrupt which is called ~186 times per second. By toggling the graphics viewport every two then one cycles, you could get a very realistic-looking four level greyscale setup. Do the newer models no longer have such a feature? Or is this down to slower CPUs?

Hmmm.

[BitwizeGHC]

I'm not sure if this particular "matrix function" is going to be smiled upon by college linear algebra professors...

Re:I must be old. (710.77345)

[G4from128k]

I must be old. I remember the time where calculators were used to do calculations and even plotting a nice graphic of a function.

You're a young whipper snapper if you "remember" plotting a nice graphic. The true old coots will remember way back when punching in 710.77345 and turning the display upside down was about as much fun as a person could have on a calculator (this trick doesn't even work on the newer bit-mapped font-based calculators). Of course as technology improved, I wasted many an hour playing "Moon landing simulator" on an HP-25 (until I turned the calculator off and lost what was in RAM).

Behind the scenes of Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

CmdrTaco: You know, we haven't had the chance to use that great 'Blue and Red Pill' icon for the Matrix section in a while. I really miss that. They were good movies, and while some might argue that they don't deserve their own section and icon, I believe they are truly a geek phenomenon.

ScuttleMonkey: Hey, why don't we post this story about using calculators to play movies. Some guy played The Matrix on his TI, it's just the excuse we need. Now everyone who visits the homepage will see the icon and think 'Wow, something about The Matrix! I am interested in that story.'

CmdrTaco: You know, that's just crazy enough to work. Well done ScuttleMonkey, when you get home tonight there'll be another storey on your parents' house. You can finally move out of the basement. Now, all we need is some news on The Hobbit movie and the One True Ring will shine on the homepage for all to see!

Disclaimer: Post written under influence of a few Pub Quiz beers.

- HM

Preview version

[SuperBanana]

For those of you tuning in on your TI calculators:

N=NEO
G=GUY
T=TRIN

Act One:

N          G
|-R ~~~~~~*X  <- Bullet time
/\         /\

Act Two:

|---Nice shot.
|

T
B  <----- N
/\         |
          /\
           |---"Whoa. Nice Latex"

Act Three:

>-Z
  |---- "Whoa.  Nice punch"

Could've done it in 3 lines of RPN, incidentally.

Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a program years ago that would convert videos to a TI calculator assembly program. That didn't end up on Slashdot, but if you want to check it out (with screenshots):

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/150/ 15079.html

Remove the space from the URL I guess.

Of course, USB is nice and all, but the video-on-calc thing has been done before. By me :)

It's nice and all but...

[ThePatrioticFuck]

Does it come with 5.1 Dolby Surround? :)

Re:what cpu?

[Script_God]

For the record, the 84+ uses a dual-speed 6/15MHz Z80.

brag about an older TI hack

[e**(i pi)-1]

I had a TI59 in high school, to which I had added a joystick as well as an interface to control my room. With the joystick, it was possible to play games like moonlanding where the printer would be the screen. The calculuator was programmed to turn on and off the lights in my room. A screenshot of the two peripherals. Of course, there was some surgergy necessary, but the TI59 had survived all.

Comments and Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all, thanks for the comments. I'll make a few myself:
* First: Thanks Google. usb8x is a Summer of Code project. Google's support meant I didn't have to find a real job.

* A greyscale movie would definitely have been better than a B&W one. But the point of Michael's demo was proof of concept for a mass-storage device driver. That's pretty darn impressive as it is, in Z80 assembly with no OS support. I'm sure someone will come along and write a pretty version soon.

* Some more details about the hardware platform: The TI84 Plus has a 15 MHZ Z80 CPU and a 96X64 monochrome display. You can fake greyscale pretty well by swaping planes. It has a 2-bit serial port, and a full-speed On-The-Go USB port. Unfortunately the OS doesn't provide any support for USB device drivers.

* OK, so I'll admit: this was mainly done for the "it's cool" factor. But there are useful applications. As silly as it may sound to you, students these days do plug in keyboards to their calculators to take notes on. Or at least TI would certainly like them to, and now they don't have to buy the ridiculously expensive TI branded keyboard to do so. And TI calculators are actually quite useful if you're in the field collecting data with a Vernier probe. Now you can carry along a USB thumb drive and not worry about running out of space for your data.

* Besides, it's cool :)

-Dan Englender

Never wanted to see this day

[drakethegreat]

Seriously I never wanted to the see the day when Slashdot would be home to WMV files. An Open Source sponsored website is posting propietary file formats that play like crap on Linux and Macs. I for one will not support this.

Re:Never wanted to see this day

[BlastM]

mencoder 2005-08-16-usb.wmv -ovc xvid -fps 24 -xvidencopts pass=1 -o 2005-08-16-usb.avi

There you go.

Yawn...

[daVinci1980]

Who cares? It's playing at ~1/3 full framerate and is barely recognizable.

This was almost interesting, but then I noticed that there was a strange pattern in the wood in my desk and I got distracted.

What were we talking about again?

Symbolic Toolbox

[Ayanami Rei]

http://www.mathworks.com/products/symbolic/

iCal Rumour

[@madeus]

I'd ask if it'd run OSX86, but there's way too many buttons.

I hear there is a rumour Apple are thinking of releasing their own calculator to help spur iBook sales in schools.

The iCalc has the same number of buttons as a TI-84, but as consession to asthetics, they arn't marked but are instead all a single unified service in a 'brushed metal' finish. Thankfully, contrary to some initial concerns that were expressed, this turns out not much of a problem because it's been intentionally optimised to perform and output the result of a single operation operation (6 x 7), additional operations having been removed so as to avoid confusing novice users.[1]

[1] Though further rumours abound this is in no small part due to the sourcing of Intel for the core chip design and that unresolvable heat disspation problems cropped up when attempting more complex operations. In fact, internal testers have reported that after extended usage, they have noted rounding errors in the units they have received (resulting in the system displaying a result for the calculation of 41.999 (recurring)).