Members of the community, namely critor and Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell have now had their TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators for a week and four days, respectively. In that time, Cemetech and its members have been enthusiastically exploring this new calculator. Among the many important developments from the past week:

• I wrote a review of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, examining it as a math and science tool and as a programming platform.
  
• My review was picked up on Slashdot, Gizmodo, Gizmodo Australia, and the MIT Technology Review, among others.
  
• I added TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition support to jsTIfied, Cemetech's online graphing calculator emulator. A news article demonstrated the support in action.
  
• Critor ran the first third-party ASM program on the TI-84+CSE, a program created by DrDnar. I created and released the first LCD-manipulating graphical demo program, called PCSEBall (animated screenshot from jsTIfied at the link), and Cemetech member tr1p1ea created an ASM program that displays a picture of the Joker from Batman, which I ran on my calculator for him.
  
• Critor documented the speed of the menus on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, showing the slight sluggishness I had discussed in my review. TI-Planet staff Adriweb also ported the classic lowercase-enabling ASM program to the new calculator, available for download in the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition program section of the Cemetech Archives.
  
• I added SourceCoder support for 265x165-pixel Picture files and 133x83-pixel Image files for the new calculator. Simply upload an image with those sizes to SourceCoder, and you can export the relevant calculator image format. This Cemetech topic demonstrates the feature in action, with sample images.
  
• Texas Instruments appears to be making an effort to limit emulator use from reading the terms of their EULA, a controversy first discovered here on Cemetech and later disseminated by the TI-Planet staff. Join the discussion if you have opinions and predictions on what will happen with this.
  
• Ryan Boyd ("Phero") of ticalc.org demonstrated TI-BASIC speed on the TI-84+CSE's homescreen on his own calculator, while at the behest of Cemetech and Omnimaga programmers, I nailed down the speed of graphscreen drawing.
  

We look forward to lots more news as the weeks roll on and more programmers get their hands on the new calculator. Cemetech will be staying on top of new programs released, tools created, and features discovered, so keep your eyes on the new posts and visit often!

I created a 8xi last night. I wonder if SourceCoder will be able to open such 84+CSE image (I mean displaying the actual image result) soon since it didn't work?

Also did you see Ryan's 2nd video? It is unlisted but he posted it in #omnimaga 2 nights ago and it shows my old RPG Mana Force running:



In general, the speed seems similar to 83+ speed, except the much slower battle transition. This game wasn't coded very well, though, so maybe the speed difference would have been greater with Illusiat 6, had it worked.

Ah, I didn't see that; I'll have to remind him to keep us up to date with such updates. Thanks for sharing, that's rather interesting. I don't know if you saw my Frogger 3.0 port, but it shows that scrolling homescreen games are predictably laggy. SourceCoder does not yet render TI-84+CSE .8xi and .8ci files, but that's coming soon, to be sure. I have some more pressing SourceCoder features than those to implement, though.

Yeah vertical scrolling will definitively be a problem. I wonder about Z-adress, though. Do you think you could make a program demonstrating 4-directional tile-map scrolling, where horizontal scrolling make use of the z-adress thing (only updating the needed sprite row) and make a screenshot demonstrating its speed?

In pure z80 ASM, that would be pretty fast. I'm a bit too busy to write such a program this afternoon, but if you keep bugging me, I might get a chance tomorrow. By the way, here's the Joker image from tr1p1ea's program as mentioned in the news post:

I wish to know, whay about sound? Port mobileTunes? Low quality sound, high quality sound, beeps, bgm, anything possible?

Since the RAM and CPU (and link port) is exactly the same as on the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition, the same things that mobileTunes 3.1 could produce on the TI-84+SE will be possible on the TI-84+CSE, and nothing more. However, if Tari, geekboy, and I ever get our external wireless CALCnet hardware prototyped, that will be capable of playing MOD tracker music.

So to summarise, is this what we wanted in terms of competition to the Casio? Is there an processing overhead penalty for having a little candy on the screen or will the production model address the disapointing performance ?

Can you discuss the picture format? How is the data laid out, etc.

From what I understand it is identical to the old pic format just with a larger size byte and obviously more data.

Hopefully the PC side magic bytes will be different otherwise it is going to be hard to tell the older pic files from the newer ones based on the header. But we won't know anything more until we see TI-Connect 4.0

I know of nothing stopping me from doing so. The PictObj type is exactly the same, and the header is identical, with the exception of two bytes:

• The version byte is now $0A instead of $00
  
• The archive byte is (of course) always $80 instead of sometimes $00 and sometimes $80.
  

The data is nibble-packed 4-bit color indices, and the data is 266/2*165 = 21945 bytes long. There is no in-band header or footer. I recommend leaving the last nibble of every row transparent (color index 0), as that's what the OS seems to do.

The CPU is much, much weaker than the Prizm's, unfortunately. An ez80 might have been able to almost measure up, but a 15MHz z80 falls quite short. The tradeoff is that the effort to port some of our existing z80 code is going to be less than would be required to port the programs to a completely different architecture.

So, would you be willing to port mobileTunes now?

Nope, not yet anyway. I first would want to get Doors CS in some kind of decent shape, so that there will be a shell to run mobileTunes. Not to mention that I have another program I want to write first.

By the way, if anyone feels that scrolling through TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus is slow, this is nothing compared to how bad the PRGM menu used to be when it was particularly crowded if your TI-83 Plus ran OS 1.12 or below:



With over 100 programs, that's how slow it got...

Actually, that looks just like a TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menu. I've been working on a few multi-KB TI-BASIC games on my TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, and the slowness of the editor is bugging me. Doors CS is going to have to do something about that. If I choose 2:Goto, I often leave my calculator for a few minutes to work on something on my laptop while I wait for it to scroll.