Today, Casio released OS 1.03 for the Casio Prizm (both fx-CG10 and fx-CG20, unlike the earlier OS update). It fixes the well-known "Locate glitch" that causes displayed characters to be colored wrong, and also several other glitches that have been reported to Casio by the community. Unlike TI, it seems like Casio are actively fixing glitches, no matter how minor they are. OS 1.03 also adds supports for the new Physium add-in, which is a periodic table.

Editor's Note: Thanks to JosJuice for finding and sharing this. To read more about the contrast between Texas Instruments' recent treatment of their loyal community and Casio's attitude towards their newfound converts, read Cemetech's well-shared editorial Casio Prizm: Why TI Calc Coders Should Abandon the Nspire CX. Of course, we still are huge enthusiasts of the TI-83+/SE and TI-84+/SE calculator lines, and development continues on many projects for the TI calculators and Casio Prizm alike here at Cemetech, as well as plenty of computer programs and games and webapps. Looking to buy a calculator for fun or school, and aren't sure whether you should go with a TI calculator or a Casio calculator? Cemetech's Back to School 2011: Calculator Guide might help you.

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Casio Prizm OS version 1.03

The update keeps failing for me, which is strange... The calc just shuts off in the middle of it, and it says "Update Failed".
Nice, Casio. Though, sorry to hear they beat Merth to making a Periodic app. However, possible new motivation to beat the standards with 3rd party awesomeness? Either way, I hope you continue making your Periodic app, Merth.

And, of course, I'll update this likely in a few minutes and play around with it.
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that I augmented JosJuice's post with a few assorted links and tidbits in order to post it as a news article to the Cemetech front page. Merthsoft, I'm sorry to hear you've run into troubles trying to upgrade; I'll try myself once I return from my conference. Ashbad, hmm, I'm sure Merth's Periodic Table app is still admirable by comparison and worth completing.
time to boot up my windows machine.
My question is why is the Physium app so large and why couldn't they have just included it in the OS update like they did with some of the e-activities from the 1.02 update?
I wonder how we can submit issues? I have a problem with string variables being only 255 characters long as a limit, and I wonder if they can do some expanding with that.
tifreak8x wrote:
I wonder how we can submit issues? I have a problem with string variables being only 255 characters long as a limit, and I wonder if they can do some expanding with that.

Haha, does the Prizm really limit string variables to 255 characters long? The last machine I used with the same limit was the Commodore 64. I was writing a simple data compression program to save files from floppy disks to cassette tapes, and I had to do the compression in chunks no larger than 127 bytes long (in case the block happened to expand up to twice as large during compression). Good times....

It sounds like the Prizm stores strings as a 1-byte length followed by the string content. If this is the case, Casio would have to change all of their string routines in order to remove the 255-character limit. If I were them, I'd make the length field 32 bits wide.
Has anyone other than Merth had difficulties loading this app? Daniel, I'm planning on trying to open up lines of communication with some Casio rep in the near future, hopefully get a way for us to tell them about issues and them to tell us about upcoming features and promotions and such.
Just completed an OS update with no hiccups what so ever.

Would like to note that an OS update doesn't seem to remove programs from the Program List, and Minesweeper still seems to be there.
Does minesweeper still work?
Yep, seems to. Smile
Well that's good. Jonimus assures me that they'd have to break just about everything in order to break our games, but it's still good to test Smile
KermMartian wrote:
Has anyone other than Merth had difficulties loading this app? Daniel, I'm planning on trying to open up lines of communication with some Casio rep in the near future, hopefully get a way for us to tell them about issues and them to tell us about upcoming features and promotions and such.


JOHN ANDERSEN
Technology Coordinator
Phone: 973-361-5400 x1509 | Fax: 973-537-8969
e-mail: jandersen@casio.com

This is about as promising as it seemingly gets. Everyone else listed in their contact page seems to be for marketing. But this is on the US based page.
Thanks very much; I've shot him over an email:

Quote:
Re: Opening a Dialog about the Casio Prizm

Mr. Andersen:

I am the founder and administrator of a hobbyist calculator programming website, Cemetech (http://www.cemetech.net). Over the past eleven years, we have primarily programming TI graphing calculators, among desktop, mobile, web programming, and hardware projects. However, we've recently seen worrying trends from TI in removing user programming tools from their devices under pressure from teachers and standardized testing companies, and it was therefore with significant happiness that we discovered and subsequently explored the Casio Prizm calculator (for example, see http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=443 for an editorial by myself on the Prizm vs. the TI-Nspire). As a community, we've developed a number of games and programs for the Prizm in the past few months (such as http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=477 ) as well as a GCC-based SDK toolchain, but we would be interested in opening a dialog with Casio about the device. We have found various bugs in the OS, some of which were fixed in OS 1.03 and some of which remain, and we have various questions about the calculator's built-in system calls and features about which we might be interested in picking a technical contact's brain. We believe we can also offer feedback from both a user/student and developer perspective that we believe might be valuable to you. I understand if you're limited in what you can reveal to us on the technical end, but either way, we believe both Casio and the budding Prizm coding community could benefit from opening lines of communication. Thanks in advance, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell
Founder and Administrator, Cemetech
http://www.cemetech.net
TheStorm wrote:
My question is why is the Physium app so large and why couldn't they have just included it in the OS update like they did with some of the e-activities from the 1.02 update?
While looking at the details of an element, a picture is displayed. Since there are pictures for almost every element (other than the ones that use the generic radioactive image), the app takes up quite a bit of space.
KermMartian wrote:
Has anyone other than Merth had difficulties loading this app?
The OS update took two tries for me, but Physium worked right away, just like all other add-ins.
For me the update repeatedly failed on an old xp netbook so I borrowed my sisters windows 7 laptop and it failed the first time but I believe that was because the device drivers were still being installed. My own computer is linux based so OS updates won't work for me there. We should bring to Casio's attention the windows only update limitation. Not just for linux users but also the large number of mac users throughout the world, especially in many schools.
z80man wrote:
For me the update repeatedly failed on an old xp netbook so I borrowed my sisters windows 7 laptop and it failed the first time but I believe that was because the device drivers were still being installed. My own computer is linux based so OS updates won't work for me there. We should bring to Casio's attention the windows only update limitation. Not just for linux users but also the large number of mac users throughout the world, especially in many schools.


I got the updater to run using wine, but it continually failed.
KermMartian wrote:
Has anyone other than Merth had difficulties loading this app?
To be clear, it's the update app that I can't get to work (I tried about three times). I'll try again later today.

Have we been able to figure out what new syscalls there are?

Kerm: I like your email. I think you should've linked to Game of Life as well, though, to show there's more than just gaming on our minds Wink. Hopefully you'll get a response that's helpful. It would be great to see a company working with its community.
Thanks, Shaun, I should have mentioned your work and TIFreak8x's work as well, I agree. Unfortunately, I was trying to quick toss that email off in between two presentations, so I didn't make it quite as thorough as I would have liked. Sorry about that. Sad I will of course let you guys know what response, if any, I receive.
  
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