I'm not sure if I ever made a topic about this (I couldn't find one) - but this is something that I made over 8 years ago.

9-Level GrayScale on the 83+/84+ line of monochrome calculators.

Once again this was something that I found on an old calc that I'm sending away to a better life. There is some rough tuning/timing but this wasn't finished. On 84+ and later calcs it works really well when synched, but the crystal timer stuff wasn't finished completely.

Still on this particular calc the image is very stable - almost as stable as 'perfect' 4-level. It uses a special '2-row' masking technique to remove any pixel rolling/flicker.

Under a high level of scrutiny you can see some movement, particularly at some shade boundaries - but overall I think it looks nice.

Here is a video, check it out!



My phone camera has picked up a reflection/shimmer off the calc's screen that isn't part of the program (you can see it present even when at the menu which is non-grayscale). If you watch the video in it's own window you can see it better.

I'm intrigued, care to explain?

It's been a long time so I need to remember back to the theory involved - however this approach differs from 'traditional' grayscale in that the masks used to give each pixel the correct time slice operate across an 8x2 pixel area so to speak - as mentioned in the chat. Technically this is 10-lvl grayscale however the 2 middle levels are opposites of one-another = the same. This is why even it appears to be more stable than traditional 8-lvl implementations (typically from memory). The downside is that it needs 4-bit planes so 4 buffers to operate.

Imagine playing BOTW on a TI-84.
Where can I get this? Can I add custom images to this?

I only have this binary and I don't think the timing stuff was ever fully implemented (not sure it will be stable on a non-84+). But I will do some testing and offer a download if people want to check it out.

The converter is ancient and based on some other more ancient converters so it has some weird restrictions -> 256 grayscale bitmap but also only use 9 independent shades for the image etc. The files were then compressed with pucrunch and linked as an appvar.

Pucrunch, sounds like a tool everyone would want. Can't wait to try this!

OK so a test download - PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

This has not been thoroughly tested and could cause all sorts of issues. Ensure you have everything backed up as appropriate. This was made 8 years ago and is unfinished.

https://tr1p1ea.net/files/downloads/gview9_v0.1a.7z

I recommend keeping everything in the archive.

When you start it will show a tuning window - it starts at 300 which is too high - my calc looks good at 185, but this will be dependent on calc model, LCD controller and battery potentially. The idea is to get the rolling diagonal line to be as unnoticeable as possible. I have no idea if this will work on newer 84+'s with the novatek controller.

ONCE AGAIN THIS MAY DESTROY YOUR CALC - BE CAREFUL! - Secondary note, it doesn't do anything that is outside of the calculators limits etc, though it does move some memory around.

Note this won't work properly in WabbitEmu.

Nice work

PuCrunch is also the standard compression for TI-68k/AMS ASM programs (ppg, ttpack/ttunpack).

That's great, indeed

Interestingly, grosged was working on greyscale stuff as well the past few days, and he got 9-level gray too, although he managed to push to 13 but it wasn't very stable apparently.

is there anyway to add custom images to the viewer as the viewr runs perfectly on my calc and ive tried uploading .8xv files to my calc to no avail.

Hey Pyro - I packaged up the VERY CRUDE converter here: https://tr1p1ea.net/files/downloads/gview9_v0.1a_converter.zip

Note that it is Windows only and there are lots of restrictions on the image files (as stated in the readme), but you can use the example images as a template if you wish.

Just drag & drop onto the 'CONVERT.bat' file and it will produce an appvar that you can send to your calc, all things going well.

thanks for the upload, things arent going well, ive tried the images provided but i get an error, it says


'tools\conv9gv' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Brass Z80 Assembler 1.0.4.1 - Ben Ryves 2005-2006
-------------------------------------------------
Assembling...
Error: Could not open file c:\users\pyro\downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\000pdata.inc
Errors: 1, Warnings: 0.
Build failed.
Could not open 000pdata.bin for reading!
Brass Z80 Assembler 1.0.4.1 - Ben Ryves 2005-2006
-------------------------------------------------
Assembling...
Error: Could not open file c:\users\pyro\downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\249526.inc
Errors: 1, Warnings: 0.
Build failed.
Could Not Find C:\Users\pyro\Downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\249526.inc
Could Not Find C:\Users\pyro\Downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\000pdata.inc
Could Not Find C:\Users\pyro\Downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\000pdata.bin
Could Not Find C:\Users\pyro\Downloads\gview9_v0.1a_converter\001pdata.bin
Press any key to continue . . .

Strange, is the conv9gv.exe file in the tools directory?

Perhaps it got corrupted somehow?

my computer deems it unsafe and removes it, i have stopped it removing it though, thanks for the help