Dr. Mitchell,

I discovered cemetech.net last night. I was on https://hackaday.com/2013/01/03/web-based-ti-graphing-calculator-emulator/ , and I read about your web-based TI calculator emulator. I would like to do the same thing for the Emu48. I have two reasons for doing this. First, I would like to have the Emu48 at my disposal on any computer that I happen to be using. If I'm drafting a survey at an office, I need a calculator to calculate curve data. Second, I've recently been to a website with a calculator for surveyors and engineers. In my opinion, the calculator was substandard; I want to offer people a better choice.
I just started learning JavaScript yesterday, so I'm looking for guidance. I don't want anyone giving me code; I have too much fun writing it myself! I think I'm going to enjoy using this website to enhance my programming knowledge and to help people.

Mark

First, welcome to the forums! I hope you enjoy your stay here.

While I'm afraid the JSTIfied emulator is closed-source and it's not like you'd learn anything remotely considered "best practice" anymore from it, there is an accurate writeup of the project available here that gives a fairly high-level overview of how the emulator works.

Basically, every major part of the hardware needs to be implemented in code- every instruction, every CPU feature, the memory, the LCD and LCD controller, etc. This is a fairly daunting task that requires an intimate understanding of how the calculator's internals work, and it's a good idea to have a solid plan before you start implementing anything.

I should also note that some of our more cynical members have already pointed out that most high-performance web applications these days are written in compiled languages like C and C++ and then compiled to webassembly ("WASM"), a fast alternative to JS that works in most modern browsers. Theoretically, it's possible to compile Emu48 to WASM or something with some extra code to bridge the gap between the GUI application and a webpage.

Not this again

Is this Critor in disguise? :p

Thanks for responding! It sounds challenging, but not impossible. I'll let you know the outcome.

I just did a very fast search and I found out that someone compiled QEMU with Emscripten. https://github.com/atrosinenko/qemujs

I have not tried the project but you can run pretty much whatever you want in QEMU. You could install a GNU/Linux distribution and then install a calculator emulator package.

Also maybe you could compile an open source emulator with Emscripten.