SourceCoder: A TI-83+ Emulator in your TI-BASIC Editor
Published by KermMartian 11 years, 10 months ago (2012-05-28T17:48:48+00:00) | Discuss this article

SourceCoder 2.5 has long been one of the most popular Cemetech tools. First released around 2005, SourceCoder 1 originally let you view the source code of TI-83, TI-83+, and TI-84+ .8xp programs in human-readable format. Soon, the ability to decode .8xi images, .8xm matrices, .8xl lists, and many other data types was added. With the help of Brazucs (now known as MysteryGuitarMan), it gained syntax highlighting rudimentary optimization capabilities. SourceCoder 2 brought an editor that let you type up programs within SourceCoder and convert them into .8xp programs. SourceCoder 2.5 overhauled the editor, improving the Javascript-powered calculator keypad and later adding Casio Prizm BASIC support. However, one perennial and somewhat far-fetched complaint remained: SourceCoder had no built-in TI-83+/84+ emulator.

For years, I resisted the requests, claiming that it was impossible to write a decent client-side TI-83+/84+ emulator, even while at the back of my mind I pondered how such a project might be completed. In December 2011, I finally realized that technology had progressed far enough to make such an emulator feasible. With HTML5, DOM Storage, and modern fast Javascript engines, a fast in-browser emulator could be created that keeps all ROMs and data client-side to avoid any possible legal issues. The result, written in a day and refined two months later, is jsTIfied, a beta of which was opened to the public in February. Since that beta, I have added more features to jsTIfied, including the ability to load programs from the users computer (you can even drag files onto the emulator's screen to load them!), export programs from the emulator back to the user's computer, and load and save SourceCoder projects.

I am now happy to announce that jsTIfied is completely integrated into SourceCoder itself. Logged-in Cemetech users may switch between the classic SourceCoder keypad that lets you type commands, tokens, and symbols, and the fully-functional jsTIfied TI-83+ emulator. You can directly load programs from the SourceCoder editor pane into your jsTIfied emulator and back without leaving the page. I am confident that this new feature will make SourceCoder an even more powerful and useful tool for TI-BASIC programmers. Please test out this new feature and let me know any feedback, comments, questions, and suggestions that you may have. Later in the summer I may do another partial overhaul of the backend and frontend and create SourceCoder 3.0, but either way, the current feature set should be functional and bug-free. Enjoy!

Cemetech Tools
SourceCoder 2.5 TI program editor
Main SourceCoder portal
jsTIfied TI-83+/84+ emulator



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