Unicorn wrote:
I feel like this will turn into a Ndless/Nspire OS sort of thing.
(Did I spell that right?)
Cemetech's administration and I personally will staunchly not support that course of action.
DJ_O wrote:
This is looking more and more like ASM and C development on this calculator will be like PRIZM development, with no direct access to the hardware and severely limited hybrid BASIC programming. This is most likely because of apps like PTTKiller.
I don't think that's an accurate analogy; the Prizm was only really limited in what it can be made to do by the lack of documentation. There is/was no hardware protection in place to stymie the developer community.
CalebHansberry wrote:
There's an eminent possibility. Depends all on what TI does in the next few months. If it turns out that way we'll be mad, but we coders/hackers are a minority; TI can ignore us and still make plenty of money. We can hope they won't, but if locking the platform against development wasn't their goal, I don't see why the 2048-bit keys or ASIC issues.
You have to understand that TI has a lot of facets to balance, and more importantly, that TI is a company of people. Some of those people see me, Cemetech's administration, and even you as allies, and these include people at high levels within TI. We have a number of advocates who have supported our work internally and feel that we overall bring more value to their devices. There are also people that are worried by some of the things we do, and the more the members of the community knee-jerk react to the directions in which it looks the technology will be going, the harder it is for our advocates to defend our work and the more examples those who doubt the value of the community have to point to.
Lionel Debroux wrote:
3) ASIC protections are clearly meant to be spokes in programmers' wheels, and their availability can be used to soothe standardized exam testing regulation authorities' worries: "look, we did something". Although it's likely that this protection will be largely as weak as those on other models, as much of a waste of time.
ASIC protections are clearly (to me) meant as a sledgehammer approach to the problem of whether ASM programmers will be able to compromise the PTT mode. I believe the engineers understand that the current approach is overkill, but I think the individuals who work with the CollegeBoard and with teachers wanted to be absolutely sure that PTT couldn't be compromised.
Quote:
However - assuming the TI-eZ80 ASIC protections don't get too much in the way (and I expect things to go that way) - the long TI-68k (official) and Nspire (unofficial) experience has shown ASM programs are seriously good
Well-said. And the more we use the current ASM capabilities to show what the community can do (positively!) in terms of educational programs and games as well, and perhaps demonstrate why we need to write Apps, the more leverage I feel the community will have to negotiate writing Apps, accessing the LCD's ports, etc.