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General Open Topic
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tsoogthoj
Newbie
Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 1
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 Posted: 29 Jul 2009 12:50:44 am Post subject: |
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| Why is the TI-86 Discontinued. The TI-86 was a great calculator. I just want to know why it was discontinued. |
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DigiTan
Unregistered HyperCam 2
Super Elite (Last Title)
Joined: 10 Nov 2003
Posts: 4468
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 01:14:26 am Post subject: |
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| That's a good question. It had a lot of games, a pretty good community, and Jimmy Mardell games! I think it got the axe after 83+ really took off. And I heard ASM was a pain on it. To tell the truth, I'm surprised TI-82 is still in continuity. That community is deader than a snake in a wagon rut. |
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IAmACalculator
In a state of quasi-hiatus
Know-It-All
Joined: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 1571
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:28:09 am Post subject: |
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| I guess TI didn't see the market for something more powerful than the 83+ and less powerful than the 89 (not to mention something without flash memory, but they could have fixed that). It's too bad too, because the 85/86 series still has its devotees. I've only ever actually used one once, but it's a calc that I wouldn't mind owning. |
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FloppusMaximus
Advanced Member
Joined: 22 Aug 2008
Posts: 472
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 04:48:52 pm Post subject: |
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DigiTan wrote: And I heard ASM was a pain on it.
Well, the 86 was certainly never as well documented as the 83+. And it's true, accessing variables on the 86 is a minor nuisance (though no more so than using archived variables on the 83+, and at least the OS provides a bunch of helpful functions for working with paged pointers.)
On the other hand... you have essentially a full RAM page of scratch space. And an interrupt hook. How cool is that? |
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bfr
Member
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Posts: 108
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:11:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Yeah, and isn't the TI-86's LCD directly memory-mapped? So that means better grayscale and no messing with a slow LCD driver, I guess. (The TI-86 is the first graphing calculator I got). |
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Fryedsoft
Newbie
Joined: 03 Dec 2007
Posts: 13
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| Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:11:25 pm Post subject: |
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I can't attest the ASM performance of the Ti-86, since I don't do ASM, but one of the big problems with the 86 (at least on the basic side) was it's speed.
Sure you got a lot of functions that the 82 had that we were clamoring for on the 85 end (such as PXLTEXT and the like), but it was easily twice as slow as the 85. You really had to be extra efficient when coding for this calc. I remember reading somewhere that it had something to do with the extra ram pages that significantly slowed it's performance. Some people believed that if Ti went the same route as the 83, and built the 86 with 32k ram and use flash for extra storage, it would have worked much better than using 96k ram.
As for why they don't make a new 86? If I had to make a guess, Ti is too in love with the 82 OS to make a new 85 OS calc. In my opinion the 85 OS was a much better OS, but I guess people were confused by it's menu system so they stuck with the 82 OS for the rest of their calc line. I'm praying that they aren't going to let the 92 OS die like the 85 OS and say the Nspire is the replacement. The Nspire OS is so crippled vs the 92 OS that I wonder why they bothered. |
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FloppusMaximus
Advanced Member
Joined: 22 Aug 2008
Posts: 472
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| Posted: 30 Jul 2009 07:59:20 pm Post subject: |
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| I haven't looked into the 86's BASIC interpreter at all, but yeah, I can imagine that it's probably very inefficient in terms of how it accesses memory. TI's software has always been heavily optimized for small code size, often ignoring speed considerations entirely. Which is kind of silly in the case of the 83 and 86, but there you are. |
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TheStorm
Calc Guru
Joined: 17 Apr 2007
Posts: 1233
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| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 10:09:09 am Post subject: |
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| I have to say My 86 is my favorite calculator. The large amout of Ram, the fact that you can type in commands, the shear amount of built in features, the menus, I mean everything about that calculator is awesome. The memory mapped display is a huge bonus. |
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