Summary: Is it possible - and if so, how difficult would it be - to port the Symbulator, a circuit simulator written in TI-Basic for the TI-89 - so that it can run on the Nspire CAS / CX CAS?

Hello. My name is Roberto Perez-Franco. I currently work at MIT. Fifteen years ago I started writing a program in TI-Basic, the Symbulator, which after two years of work became my undergraduate thesis, and a very solid piece of code, widely used by electrical engineering students. Ten years have elapsed since I made the last bug fix to the program. In the intervening time TI has discontinued the TI-89.

The program should run fine in the TI-89 Titanium, but I am wondering… since TI has gone all in with this Nspire thing, would it be possible to port the Symbulator to the Nspire CAS platform? I am willing to make the Symbulator an open source or a CC BY NC SA licensed software. The idea is to keep it alive, free and available for future generations of engineering students. It's a pretty strong program.

Any ideas? You can email me to roberto at mit dot edu

It is most certainly possible. Is the program still in BASIC? One way or another, it can certainly be ported.

It can possibly be ported to TI-BASIC, but you'd probably have much more luck with Lua. While the TI-Nspire would be a good choice for it, have you also considered the TI-83+/84+ series and the Casio Prizm? Does the program require a CAS in order to function?

The Symbulator is written 100% in TI-Basic, for TI-89. It depends heavily on the CAS.

I have come to take this project on this summer. Any pointers would be extremely appreciated. So far I plan on going through the 89 code, finding where it differs from Nspire BASIC, recreate the logic using Nspire syntax and pray for the best!

Well I have my first update on this project. The good news is its much easier than I thought to get it to actually complete the program and give a correct result. The bad news is finding run time errors is a pain. Anyways, I dont know if anyone really cares here (if you know a better forum, let me know please) but here is a video showing the program working (mostly):
http://youtu.be/_ESWOawfJzg

Hey there,

I'm curious about the state of your port.
Could you update us on how you're faring?

Alternatively, do you think we could test your work?

Thanks so much for looking into this!