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Ultimate Calculator 3 Progress Published by KermMartian on February 8, 2010 at 3:03:52 AM CST | Discuss this article (33) Over the past few weeks, I've been starting on my design for the Ultimate Calculator 3, the successor of the Ultimate Calculator 1 and the Ultimate Calculator 2. While both previous Ultimate Calculators involved casemodding an existing TI-83+ calculator, the latest revision will be housed in an entirely new case. Plans had original been devised for a laptop-style or clamshell case, with a QWERTY keyboard on the lower half and a screen and speakers on the upper half. As the design matured, it evolved into a slide-style case, which is useable as a calculator in expanded mode and as a gaming device in collapsed mode. I started formal development by designing a clickable joystick for the upper half, based around the thumb-slide joystick from Sparkfun Electronics that I got as part of my Free Day order (thanks to CDI for the idea to use this). Next I designed the internal layout of the device, ending up with a form factor that will probably be 3.25" x 6.5" x 0.8", not much bigger than an original TI-83+ in any dimension. I then brainstormed a bus method that will allow the TI-OS's bus manager chip (a proprietary microcontroller about which little to no data is available) to directly access to QWERTY keyboard in direct input mode, but will allow an ATMega328 microprocessor to do key translation between the keypad and the bus manager chip, allowing different 2nd/alpha functions to be mapped to each key's primary function, eg, [ALPHA][PRGM] types A instead of C. Finally, I soldered a working LCD to a working motherboard to make sure a long cable between the mainboard and screen would work, decoded part of the pinout for the microcontroller on the TI-83+'s motherboard that coordinates input and output, and spent several nerve-racking hours soldering leads onto the legs of the chip. More progress in the near future in between working on my Master's thesis. Permalink | TI-84+ OS v2.53 Leaked Published by KermMartian on February 7, 2010 at 6:18:00 PM CST | Discuss this article (45) The latest revision of Texas Instruments' OS for the TI-84+/SE calculators, OS v2.53, will be released on February 15th, and was recently leaked to the community. It contains several new features, many of which appear to be inspired by applications written by community members and by features of other TI calculator models. It appears that applications such as PrettyPrint (now called "MathPrint" in the new two-page MODE menu), CtlgHelp, and GeoMastr hard-coded into the OS. Preliminary examination reveals there to be many new hooks and 96 new bcalls in this version. Stay posted for more updates as more information is released.
Thanks to SirCmpwn for writing this article and researching the OS Permalink | One Hundred Thousand Posts Published by KermMartian on January 31, 2010 at 3:38:10 PM CST | Discuss this article (13) Roughly ten years after Cemetech first evolved out of a hardware company idea I had, named CTech, I am proud to announce that this is the 100,000th post on the Cemetech forum. The current statistics have their origin in 2004, when I introduced an InvisionFree forum to the Geocities website of Cemetech. In the spring of 2005, we moved to better hosting, and I started a phpBB forum that started with over 9,000 posts from the Invisionfree board. The current Cemetech forum is the direct descendant of that phpBB forum; since 2005, we have amassed 1,195 users, who have written 100,000 posts in 3,833 topics totalling 3,622,606 words and garnering 7,055,343 topic views. The Cemetech file archives, long a goal of mine, contain 405 programs and files created by myself and another 44 authors, and in roughly three years have collected 18,048 downloads. Today, Cemetech is home to diverse conversations on calculator programming, hardware, and modifications, web and computer programming and applications, gaming, general interest, and mostly recently, builds and development in The Better Mod and the upcoming game from several Cemetech members, Freebuild. Here's to many more decades of new friends, new projects, and in the spirit of Cemetech, the continued drive towards the future. Permalink | Freebuild Linux Support Published by elfprince13 on January 26, 2010 at 2:28:16 PM CST | Discuss this article (14) Freebuild, the multiplayer block-building game currently being developed by Cemetech members Elfprince13 and CyberPrime, now has a working Linux build. Though the game has not yet reached a full alpha release, those interested in testing out the fledgling project can download the current SVN version. The screenshot below shows the game running natively (not via Wine) on Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala". Feel free to post any questions, comments, bugs, or requests in the attached topic. Click to enlarge Permalink | | ||||||||||||||
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