Release of TilEm2

[contra-sh]

TilEm is dead, long live TilEm2

Benjamin Moody (floppus maximus) and myself Thibault Duponchelle(contra-sh) are proud to announce the first release of TilEm2.

You probably already know TilEm "old" because it was a good emulator serving the community since 2000 (written by Julien Solignac then improved and maintained by Moody Benjamin)
For those who don't know, TilEm is an emulator that reproduce behavior of z80 based Texas Instrument Calculator (TI73 through TI86 including the TI81 :p). As the others emulators, TilEm2 needs an official rom of course.

TilEm old was available for GNU/Linux natively then ported to Windows and Mac.
TilEm2 is already available for GNU/Linux and Windows (TilEm2 is likely to work on Mac OS X, but we have not tested it)

3 years ago, I joined the team and we started to work on a new version of TilEm.
Even if it seems to be a sequel, all the code was written from scratch, including a new emulation core written by Benjamin.

This new version is released for beta testing.

It features highly detailed hardware emulation.
TilEm 2's hardware emulation is greatly improved - it's now at least on par with, and in some cases better than, any other emulator released to date. 
All of the Z80 models are supported (including both hardware revisions of the TI-81 and both revisions of the TI-82); the only part of the hardware that is not currently emulated is the TI-84 Plus USB controller.
 
Sending/receiving programs, variables, and applications :

• TilEm2 uses libticalcs and provides visual feedback by printing progress and allowing cancel.
• You can send single or grouped vars, flashapp, or whatever you want.
• A nice receive window allow you to save programs from your calc to you computer.
• There's also the possiblity to send and receive to and from the ti81.

Grayscale emulation :

• TilEm has had grayscale support for many years (originally an FIR filter supporting only 4 levels; later changed to an IIR filter supporting 64 levels, but with a tendency to flicker.)  TilEm 2, however, uses a completely new grayscale algorithm based on a modified FIR filter, which should work a lot better.

Saving screenshots :

• You can record animations (gif) or simply grab a static screenshot (png, bmp, gif output and more...).
• There's a lot of setting as size (at least 3 default size per model plus custom size), foreground/background color, animation speed.
• And of course a preview window to see before saving what you have done.

A full featured debugger for assembly programming :

• With memory view (could be edited), disassembly view, registers (could be edited), stack, breakpoints, step by step, and more ...

Macro :

• It allow to record key press and execute automatically (at startup or when you load the macro file).

New pack of skin and new skin format (TiEmu skin file) :

• You can now do a skin for TilEm2 in 15 min and you can do some funny stuff(see the documentation about skins)

This version has a new and improved user interface, as well as many
improvements to the hardware emulation.
See the project website at http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tilem/ for more
information.

This release is only a step, development goes on. We will add some new features to TilEm2 soon. In addition to the features you will request and bug we will have to fix.
You will find a long user manual here : http://contra-sh.users.sourceforge.net/user_manual.html
This program was made for YOU users.
Please report bugs and feature request (on the Sourceforge forum : http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilem/forums/forum/84646)
The current maintainers of TilEm are Benjamin Moody and Thibault Duponchelle (but many other people have played a part in making this program possible especially Hugues Luc Bruant "fullmetalcoder" who started a qt gui and helped us a little for other stuff and Scott Zeid which provides the pictures from which are based the icons).

Have fun with TilEm2 !!!

Liens :

Official website
Download TilEm2
PDF documentation
Online Doc
Contact

[Juju]

Nice, I'll try this tonight.

[Art_of_camelot]

Wow, very nice. I haven't seen any news about tilem in years. It's always nice for the community to have more options for these sort of things. ^^

[shmibs]

it looks pretty great =)
the gui is still a bit blurry, though, probably because of the arbitrary resizing stuffs.
here's a screenshot:
oh, and it doesn't seem to come with any skins, so you can use this quick 84+ one to test it out and then make your own with skinedit and this collection of calc images from tiplanet. just make sure that images you use have no alpha channel or the program will crash.

[alberthrocks]

Nice! I've heard about this in the works, so it's great to see it working!

[contra-sh]

Thank you
And it really works (and really rocks)

[ACagliano]

I'd like to make a request. When you guys officially get the Mac working, please distribute it as either an installable package or as a .APP file, not something you have to do...

Code: Select All | Copy To Clipboard

1 2 3

./configure make sudo make install

...on. I hate those.

[contra-sh]

Ok,

But we firstly need someone to help us to package for Mac OS X because we are not Mac users

[shmibs]

this looks like it might be what you'll need:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gtk-osx/

[Deep Thought]

Wow, that looks really nice.

the gui is still a bit blurry, though, probably because of the arbitrary resizing stuffs.

Glad to hear it has arbitrary resizing, anyway

[Juju]

I own a Mac, I'll probably try to do something. You could package it with MacPorts or something. (That's what I'm doing atm, compiling it with libs found in MacPorts.)

[aeTIos]

Well, I've installed this, but it doesnt seem to either like my ROM or work correct... (I dumped my ROM via TiLP)
It's just showing a blank screen.

[adriweb]

I own a Mac, I'll probably try to do something. You could package it with MacPorts or something. (That's what I'm doing atm, compiling it with libs found in MacPorts.)

I got some pkg-config errors while trying to ./configure

[Juju]

I own a Mac, I'll probably try to do something. You could package it with MacPorts or something. (That's what I'm doing atm, compiling it with libs found in MacPorts.)

I got some pkg-config errors while trying to ./configure

I didn't, IIRC. Make sure you have the pkg-config package installed. Installing GIMP should be enough, I think.

[FloppusMaximus]

the gui is still a bit blurry, though, probably because of the arbitrary resizing stuffs.

Scaling to arbitrary sizes, accurate scaling, sharp pixel graphics: pick any two.
(If you prefer sharp graphics over accuracy, then you can turn off smooth scaling in preferences.  But I think that looks awful.)

Well, I've installed this, but it doesnt seem to either like my ROM or work correct... (I dumped my ROM via TiLP)
It's just showing a blank screen.

I'm guessing this means you're using one of the calc models for which we don't yet have a skin.  (Oops, maybe we should have made that clearer.  Sorry about that.  And we should probably use other model skins as fallbacks.)  If you have a skin in TiEmu format (such as the one shmibs posted), you can select it in the preferences, or pick one of the ones installed with TilEm (they're in the share/tilem2/skins directory.)  Also, you can use the keyboard; see the KEYS file (KEYS.txt in the Windows distribution) for details.  F12 is the On key.

If anyone has a high-quality image of their calculator that we could use for a skin, and would be willing to release it under a free license so we can include it with TilEm, that would be fantastic.  Calculators we're currently missing skins for are TI-73, TI-83+ SE, TI-84+ SE, Nspire, and TI-85, and I wouldn't say no to a nice TI-82 STATS.fr skin to round out the collection.