Since the release of TI's thin, light, ez80-powered TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator, I have received countless YouTube comments, Cemetech PMs and posts, and emails about when Doors CS / Doors CSE would be available for the new calculator. Stumbling blocks including technical limitations related to the new calculator and my own lack of free time had forced me to say that I wasn't sure when or if a version of Doors CS/CSE would be available for the TI-84 Plus CE. For a long time, I hoped that an App key might become available from TI so that there might be a TI-84 Plus CE App version of Doors CS/CSE. It appears that that's not forthcoming, so in the meantime, I've been working on a port of Doors CS/CSE as a program, to be called Doors CE. Like the much-celebrated Cesium from Cemetech Expert MateoConLechuga, the new Doors CE is visible in the [PRGM] menu, and can be started by running a prgmA that Doors CE creates when you install it.
Since the beginning of October, I have been documenting my progress on putting together a Doors CE port for the TI-84 Plus CE. The following features have been completed, delta a little debugging:
Since the beginning of October, I have been documenting my progress on putting together a Doors CE port for the TI-84 Plus CE. The following features have been completed, delta a little debugging:
- Launcher: Doors CE creates a special launcher when it is installed and archives its bulk as an AppVar to leave RAM for user programs. The launcher also switches between Doors CE and assembly programs when the user executes a program.
- Desktop: Doors CE can display BASIC and Assembly programs on its desktop, list an arbitrary number of programs, and scroll. Locked, archived, and hidden programs are correctly annotated as such. Folders can be created, and files can be moved between folders. Programs can be created, renamed, duplicated, deleted, and even edited. The clock works.
- Doors CE and Options Menus: The Doors CE menu ("start" menu) works correctly, and each of its sub-menus functions. The Options menu works, and most of the options in Options do what they're supposed to.
- Executing nostub BASIC programs: BASIC programs can be executed from the Doors CE desktop from RAM or Archive.
- Executing nostub ASM programs: ASM programs can be executed from the Doors CE desktop from RAM or Archive. Writeback is correctly performed.
- HomeRun: The HomeRun feature that lets programs be executed from the homescreen, regardless of whether they're BASIC or ASM, Archived or in RAM, or require libraries is incomplete (but nearly done). BASIC programs currently work; ASM programs do not.
- xLIBCE: The venerable Patrick "tr1p1ea" Prendergast is working hard to port xLIBC to the TI-84 Plus CE for inclusion in Doors CE. Since he has a busy job and a young family, I appreciate his willingness to work on xLIBCE in his minuscule free time.
- Celtic 2 CE: I will be porting the Celtic 2 CSE libraries from Doors CSE. With the permission of authors like MateoConLechuga, I may add additional functions, including ToString.
- ASM/C libraries: MateoConLechuga has also strongly hinted that he is completing tools that will make it easy to use ASM and C libraries in programs without explicit shell support. Doors CE will be leveraging this time- and effort-saving breakthrough from Mateo.