Breaking news: Donald Trump has weighted in on the controversy:

Nah, you'll be fine

A lot of the skills you've acquired here will almost certainly carry over quite readily to other devices and other languages. The obvious example here is writing C code for a PC/Mac application.

I don't think this is going to invalidate anything. The projects still exist, and there will still be a number of people who will not update.

It will be interesting to see how things progress from here. I know that I will probably post my non-calculator-related projects more aggressively to partially compensate for the loss in calculator projects and hopefully others may do the same.

I share the sentiment that I was pretty devastated when the news broke.

This is very disappointing and is basically the end of a long era for our community; one that has spanned several decades - all because some French teacher wanted to get some likes and ad revenue by sensationalizing a non-issue.

No-one wants the cat-and-mouse game of relying on shady exploits and other potentially unsafe modifications just to run custom code. TI was in a unique position relative to some other platforms here, but alas it all seems done for now.

That being said I do believe that Cemetech will not benefit from any such talk at this time.

I am hopeful though that TI will throw the community a carrot of some kind.

beckadam I believe there is potential for them to release the Python stuff outside of Europe so that might be of interest to you and others who are feeling disenfranchised at the moment.

Stay strong everyone!

No, it's clear that you can't say the same. Exploits will just be hosted and discussed outside the well-known sites of the community, in places none of the respective sites' staff members moderate in any way

Preemptively forbidding discussion of exploits and ways to temporarily open back the platform is an extreme measure IMO, at least if it extends to usage of programs containing exploits. It is in stark contrast with what allowed the Nspire community to make progress on the initial opening of the Nspire platform in 2009, on United TI (i.e. Cemetech, nowadays) and yAronet, in pre-Ndless times.
However, this guideline will make zero difference in practice: ever since the prehistoric UTI + yAronet era, the discussion of the workings of Nspire exploits has been done privately. The same has happened for I don't know how many years in other jailbreaking communities for gaming consoles or whatever, for good reasons... so TI-eZ80 exploits will be developed and discussed privately, on other venues, it's as simple as that

I don't see why TI would think this was a good idea. The fact is that most cheating programs for the calculator are written in TI-BASIC, the best language to use for this due to its easy integration with OS variables and math functions, input routines, and so on. Removing assembly doesn't make sense: small exploits will always exist, and it is completely illogical to ruin thousands of developers' experience on the calculators due to a security vulnerability that was fixed long ago. I know that without being able to program on the 84+ CE, I would never have become interested in programming at all, and without the ASM functionality, I never would advanced to ICE, and then C. I'm sure this is the case for a large number of members on Cemetech, and on other websites as well.

So I am hurt by this decision, and I fail to see the logic in Texas Instruments disregarding its massive community of calculator enthusiasts. I hope they will realize that this was a mistake, and give us back the ASM functionality that we deserve again. In the meantime, as ProgrammerNerd said, I plan on buying an HP Prime G2 and asking HP for C support there. I hope that others will do the same.

I have gotten a response from my ti-cares email, and as expected the response was incredibly generic. However, they did indicate that the TI-84 plus CE would get its next update in late summer, but they could not give me any information about what that update would include. I believe this is the first official news we've gotten from TI regarding the next update for other CE's. I hope this means that the update won't remove assembly support, but at this point my hopes aren't very high.

Edit: According to Adriweb, assembly removal is global, so unless something happens before then, it will be removed from the 84CE this summer .

Good thing Kerm and Cemetech spent the past decade cozying up to TI and republishing their press releases in order to build good will to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Oh wait...

I was just notified of this by cvsoft. I haven't been active for a while, but this move by TI is a reversal of decades long TI-83/84+ policy and disgusts me. I refuse to legitimize their actions at all; assembly programming has had an overwhelmingly positive effect on the community and STEM education in general.

I just saw this on Twitter, and honestly, I'm super unhappy with this decision, but they know exactly what will happen, because we've cracked their application signing keys how many times now?

Anti-downgrade protection sucks, but we'll find our way around this. We always do. I would be willing to wager once the keys are cracked, someone will start looking into OS Patching, and we'll see some interesting stuff come out of this.

Now back to the shadows I go...

Well and from a corporate standpoint, there is benefit to publicly portraying cheaters as hackers rather than giving them the means to do what they are doing, as long as they can still portray their security as being secure in some way.

While I suppose I do have faith that we can crack it, I'm sure Dr. Kerm Martian agrees that it's disappointing that we should be expected to take the stance of supporting cracking TI's security, rather than TI attempting to embrace the low level programming while opposing test cheating. With that being said; I do hope he would take that undesirable stance, rather than siding with TI, at odds with the desires of this community right here that he has built up for over 15 years.

Will I guess its time to move to computer programing, exploits, and mods.

Sorry for double posting ...

to allow rollback cant you just remove the micro processer that stores the call from. and install a new with even more ram?

That's what the "Edit" button is for.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. The calculator has two main digital ICs: a flash chip and an ASIC that contains the CPU, RAM, internal buses, peripheral logic blocks, and I/O. You could certainly remove it, but it's a fully custom chip. There's nothing else out there that you could solder in its place.

No. The "micro processer" is part of an ASIC designed and manufactured by TI, not an off-the-shelf part. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an identical ASIC with more memory. It might be more reasonable to use an FPGA for the same purpose, but in order to do that, you'd need TI's design for the ASIC, which they obviously aren't giving to anyone. And even if you could add more RAM, the OS wouldn't even know that it exists. You would have to heavily modify the OS, as well as any assembly, C, or ICE programs, to make use of the new memory.

Linus Tech Tips talks about the removal of ASM/C support in their WAN Show, calling TI's move bad, stupid and dumb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sxFWAiKnHg&t=3360s

Nice catch boric! Thanks for posting!

Apparently someone on the LTT forum has a friend who works for TI (not the calculator division though). It doesn't seem like the rest of the company really knows what's going on here, but I'm not exactly surprised about it.

(in case you didn't catch it, the quote is sarcastic)

TI Education Technology doesn't really fit anywhere in TI's broader portfolio. They're mainly a semiconductor company, not a consumer products company. As the post says, Education Technology generates a small fraction of TI's revenue. TI keeps it around because it's their most profitable division (or at least it was last time I checked . . . which was like 2007); Education Technology is basically free money for stock holders.

Edit: Just to clarify, in the 1970s, desktop calculators were cutting-edge technology. It's not like the Education Technology division just materialized out of nowhere; there was a time when it made sense.

Question for you guys.

Why don't we retool and focus our attentions on the 68k series? They were powerful calculators, we already have the setups to program in C for them, and they are cheap enough to get.

We could make the 68k series popular again

Well...
* TI gave up on the TI-68k series nearly 17 (89, 92+) and 15 (V200, 89T) years ago;
* brand-new TI-68k calculators have always been, and are still, sold at high price tags, and as such, price tags for used calculators aren't necessarily as low as they could be;
* no TI-68k model has a PTT mode or a PTT LED;
* the 68000 is relatively unpopular nowadays. It shows in the toolchain: it's been over a decade since m68k stopped being a tier 1 GCC ISA, with optimization bugs such as https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=40454 creeping in, and correctness issues becoming more frequent ( https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88589 , though I didn't use upstream GCC). GCC4TI's heavily patched GCC 4.1.2 doesn't build, let alone produce correct code, on modern computer OS and toolchains;
* neither NewProg, nor GCC4TI did budge the apathy of the community, which largely died in 2006-2007, effectively when the Nspire was introduced but clearly not because of it.

I could certainly go on, but I think you (plural) are getting the point very well. Sadly, as much as I like, and I am / was knowledgeable about, the TI-68k series, it's been over 11 years since I understood that nothing would make the TI-68k series popular again. I realized it several days after the initial GCC4TI release. It's probably the first time I'm stating it in a public manner on one of the message boards of the community, although I already stated it on unlogged IRC chans.

Amusingly, tonight, I spent like 10 minutes, for the first time in 2020 and AFAICT for the first time in nearly a year, working on GCC4TI, specifically doing a copy-paste-modify job adding support for MIN_AMS=102 to GCC4TI, now that we know that this version is "publicly" available (well, in a prototype calculator which mr womp womp bought). I'm not even convinced I'll publish the commit: nobody will use it and it's trivial anyway. But working on GCC4TI is an exception, not a rule. Ever since I became the maintainer of libti*/gfm/tilp & skinedit/tiemu, shortly after being one of the creators (and the main developer) of GCC4TI, I worked more on the LPG software, even though I was less familiar with them, simply because they have more users and are therefore more useful.

Frankly, at this stage, IMO, and even if it has its flaws, the NumWorks N0110 is a much better development platform than the TI-68k series
People don't even need a real NumWorks calculator to develop for this platform: I've contributed to the Epsilon firmware, in both N0100 and N0110 times, without owning either calculator. I only saw a real NumWorks calculator (and a real Casio Graph 90+E, too) like twice, when meeting JB Boric + Adriweb + Bernard Parisse, and Bernard Parisse alone.

EDIT: the openness of the TI-eZ80 platform was TI's best protection against some developers fleeing to the open and technically globally (much) superior NumWorks platform. That won't happen any longer... though who knows, some stupid standardized testing regulators (a.k.a. enemies of mankind progress) might find a way to force closing down the NumWorks platform just like the TI-eZ80 series, and thereby kill the NumWorks company, reducing the number of modern graphing calculator manufacturers back to the three big entrenched manufacturers...

Community calculator time! Easy C development, built-in BASIC and Python, open hardware and OS, usable on standardized tests, easy to use like the z80 series. Let's do it!