Using text() to erase portions of the screen was common too, right?

So they hardly upgraded the TI-84+, but they severely broke backwards compatibility... yeah, excellent job TI.
Backwards compatibility on the TI-68k series was broken multiple times, but the TI-Z80 series was relatively free of that... until now.

Well, the original move from the TI-83 to the TI-83+ broke ASM programs completely. There hasn't been much changed since then though.

Indeed, that's why I wrote relatively free

I'm still quite surprised, and rather not sure how all compatibility could be broken directly. I mean, the same basic commands are there, so why would it not work (especially for Homescren programs, which represent 99% for highschool students anyway), and even for graph-screen programs, considering all the instructions would be there too.
The only thing I could think of is if they changed the syntax of some instructions....

But then, some automatic converter could be done "easily", I guess.
Also, good idea for some kind of asm program acting as a hook to provide some on-calc compatibility

Sega had a wonderful idea back when they were making genesis games: make games that had code blocks that wouldnt get accessed by current systems, but would with updated card things.

now that we know the 84C exists, with broken compatibility, maybe we could start making "Forward compatibility"?

either that or i should keep my mouth shut. ill take a screenshot of the page on gamepro i read that on. some 1997 edition...

I'm kind of along the lines of thought that someone else expressed. Maybe all the programs will still work, just be much smaller on the screen? As elfprince said, let's wait until we can get our hands on a calculator and start throwing games on to it. I have a few that might make it to that calculator :p

If we could have anticipated this, yes, we could have had every program call into a special module to get the current screen dimensions and to turn pixels on and off. But we didn't, and that would have way slowed down old programs anyway, so c'est la vie.

By the way, thanks to a Dutch user on #omnimaga, information about the memory (this is with 6-ish apps loaded):

ouch, the Ram is kinda lacking...
i hope Ti had only pre-releases with this kind of memory, and the real release in spring to have much better ram

Probably 4 MB of Flash memory, and no memory-mapped screen buffer ?
We can't know, from this picture alone, how much RAM the 84+ C truly has, as previous models displayed similar figures, even those which had 48 KB or 128 KB of RAM.
( translated from http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=132283#p132283 )

Vijfhoek has made an album of his shots so far, but it was on the SAX, so im posting it on here for those who missed it:

http://imgur.com/a/GeDfG

Thanks for posting that; you beat me to it. Perhaps one of my intrepid administrators would care to either update the latest news article or post a new one with those specifics?

Boy, I hope it doesn't actually have 24K of RAM! I really believe it does, however, and that is too bad. Thankfully with DCS7 it doesn't affect one too much, but still.

I am definitely glad they broke backwards compatability, because it probably would keep the calculator back somehow... I am not an ASM programmer, but that still seems to be the way things are. My opinion is that Commodore was harmed by that whatever they did, they always needed to maintain C64 compatibility.
I do agree with Lionel that if you are going to break backwards compatibility, you should make it somewhat better.
Also, I agree that to lack BASIC backwards compatibility would be just laziness on TI's part.
[EDIT] Great pictures! It looks nice to me!

TI-82 28 KB
TI-83/82STATS 26 KB
TI-73 25 KB
TI-83+/84+/SE 24 KB
TI-84+CSE 21 KB

It keeps dropping D:

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a much larger RAM chip to hold the buffers and stuff, though. Even if there is 21 KB of RAM, if the total RAM is 512 KB or even 1 MB, that could become interesting for ASM (and Axe, assuming it ever gets ported) programmers

Interesting; you're the first person to say that they actually like the lack of backward compatibility, even if you agree that it may be laziness (or more accurately, not worth the resources for them to implement). They explained that the reason they didn't try to maintain backwards compatibility was that the images were just too tiny and unreadable (and presumably a scaling layer that would make each pixel 3x wider and 3x taller was either too slow or technically infeasible).

Haha, I think there is stuff in the RAM, making it 24KB...

@Kerm: Well, do you agree with me?

That was my assumption as well, Caleb. Although that might very well not be the case, since this is a school rather than personal calculator.

Edit: @Caleb: No, I personally do not agree with you there. I think they should have tried to maintain some semblance of compatibility with older ASM and BASIC programs, unless there were technical roadblocks.

Serious??? The school and personal models could be different???

No. A school calculator is less likely to have been loaded with programs and such that would be taking up RAM.

32kB actually but the OS and builtin stuff take up more and more space in each release.