Brandon Wilson recently managed to get Linky (http://brandonw.net/svn/calcstuff/Linky/) to the point that you can emulate a USB flash drive using the TI-89 Titanium and a raw image of sectors you supply.

He packaged the program, the image for the NT Offline Password and Registry Editor boot disc, and the PC program to create TI-89 Titanium Flash applications out of raw sector images at: http://brandonw.net/calcstuff/NTPasswd.zip.

YouTube video showing it:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZREMb1dK0w" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZREMb1dK0w</a>

This same thing could be used to boot DOS or Windows 3.1 as well -- anything known to fit on a floppy disk (or bigger -- there's about 2.3MB to work with).

Hopefully this also gets people more excited about the prospect of a real USB library coming to the TI-89 Titanium, so that it can enjoy all the usb8x goodness that the 84+/SE has.

I believe I've tracked down the bug with For( loops being very slow when the first line is a lone If block with a false condition and there's no ) or newline between the For( and the If.

It's complicated and hard to explain, but basically the code that handles the For( token assumes that you've put the ) on the end of the For( line, and so when it executes the For block, instead of jumping to the start of the line containing the If, it jumps to the If token itself.

Normally this isn't a problem, but it's important for the parser to handle the start of the line because it removes a byte from the operator stack that always gets pushed when beginning parsing of the line. Because an If block with a false condition will jump over the next line (including the newline), this never gets canceled out at the beginning of the loop, and so with every iteration you lose bytes of the operator stack. This in turn causes memory leaks and confuses the parser about what temporary variables should be cleaned up, and it's forced to near-constantly "garbage collect".

Or at least that's my theory.

In any case, the For( code shouldn't be making that stupid assumption, so I patched my OS to see if I could fix it, and it appears successful. I uploaded it to http://brandonw.net/crap/84P_OS2.41_BASICFixed.8xu if anyone wants to try it.

So we could be happy with this, or we could write an oncalc patch that does this in an OS version-independent way, or we could just live with the fact that you need a ).

Thoughts?

Does anyone have a TI-76.fr or TI-82 Stats.fr (not TI-82 Stats)?

I will be coming across one of each and I believe that because they're so similar in hardware, that they can be converted to 83+s, just like TI-73/Explorers (via Chameleon).

I'm curious if it would be worth it to put the development time into expanding Chameleon (or coming up with something new) to make that possible.