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Author Topic: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!  (Read 13997 times)

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Offline DrDnar

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #30 on: February 07, 2013, 05:43:02 pm »
Quote from: DJ_O on February 07, 2013, 04:10:33 pm
Oh I didn't know the clock used Crystal timers. I was sure it was an extra thing added to the calc.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. It uses the same frequency reference, a single generic 32768 Hz crystal, but is an entirely separate circuit from the three timers. It would have been silly for TI to build a calculator with four identical crystals. Well, at least my calculator only has one physical crystal in it. (If you open up your calculator or watch, the crystal can be found in a metal cylinder less than 0.5 cm in diameter and less than 2 cm long, with two wires coming out of it.) Almost all quartz-crystal-based clocks, both "analog" and digital, use a 32768 Hz crystal as their time reference. The power of 2 makes it easy to make a counter that increments or pulses once a second.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2013, 05:46:18 pm by DrDnar »
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #31 on: February 07, 2013, 10:07:43 pm »
I was responding to another post and was surprised that the clock made use of the crystal timers because I thought I read before that it was just a clock or something not necessarily dependent on crystal timers. Keep in mind I don't know anything about the 83+/84+ hardware, though, let alone clock hardwares.

Not that the 84+ clock is any useful anyway, though. First, it only appears at a few places, and secondly everytime a RAM clear occurs you have to setup the clock again.

UPDATE: Those who attended the conference can now download it again! They got an e-mail with a link to it and the required software to play it. I might check again later to see if I didn't miss any important info.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2013, 10:13:06 pm by DJ_O »
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #32 on: February 09, 2013, 05:20:15 am »
Update: I re-checked the Webinar again and we can see the first 3 colors that can be used as outer-background for graphing. It seems they are not the same as the rest, so I wouldn't be surprised if Black wasn't an option.
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #33 on: February 09, 2013, 05:42:54 pm »
I also just checked the webinar again and I found something very telling, which managed to pop up only because the guy happened to have an Image file selected when he switched to Windows Explorer:



We can tell a couple of things from this screenshot:
1) 8CA is the file format (and isn't associated with TI-Connect yet, lol lazy developers)
2) Filesize is around 22000 bytes, which means it's likely 133x83 pixels in 16-bit color (which is would be 22078 bytes of raw data). The guy misquoted the graph screen resolution as 133x83 earlier in the presentation, but I think he was accidentally quoting the background image size instead. 133x83 is half of the actual graph screen resolution of 265x165, rounded up, which makes sense because the background image pixels look doubled.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #34 on: February 09, 2013, 11:58:05 pm »
That is sad IMHO if the images can't be more than 133x83, yet are this large. On the PRIZM you had 56-60 KB large images that were 384x216 and 16 bits colors.

If this is the case, then this pretty much end all BASIC coders hopes to use images for game graphics. :(
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Offline Sorunome

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #35 on: February 10, 2013, 05:31:01 pm »
meh, there are still ascii graphics and maybe we'll get a axe version for it for more awesomeness :D
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #36 on: February 10, 2013, 06:25:46 pm »
Quote from: DJ_O on February 09, 2013, 11:58:05 pm
That is sad IMHO if the images can't be more than 133x83, yet are this large. On the PRIZM you had 56-60 KB large images that were 384x216 and 16 bits colors.

If this is the case, then this pretty much end all BASIC coders hopes to use images for game graphics. :(
Well, if they're streaming the background image directly from archive like I think they are (they can't even be sent to RAM), any sort of compression would make graph screen operations incredibly slow, and we don't want that. And since they're in archive, I don't think there's much reason you shouldn't use them (too bad there are only 10 slots available though).
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #37 on: February 10, 2013, 07:08:25 pm »
Well I was more refering to how high res images might not be possible, and that we might have to forget title screens like I posted above.

On the other hand, if we can still StorePic what we're drawing on the graph screen using the 16 colors, then that might possibly be a good alternative. On the PRIZM we can make 8-color images that way (although it's hard to draw anything compared to a 83+) and those images are much smaller in size.
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #38 on: February 10, 2013, 09:29:30 pm »
Quote from: DJ_O on February 10, 2013, 07:08:25 pm
Well I was more refering to how high res images might not be possible, and that we might have to forget title screens like I posted above.

On the other hand, if we can still StorePic what we're drawing on the graph screen using the 16 colors, then that might possibly be a good alternative. On the PRIZM we can make 8-color images that way (although it's hard to draw anything compared to a 83+) and those images are much smaller in size.
I can't make any firm conclusions for that, but I feel fairly certain that Pic files will be 4-bit (15 colors and 1 transparent/white), which at 4x the resolution of Image files would come out to about the same size of 22KB (and obviously must be stored in archive as well).
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Offline DrDnar

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #39 on: February 10, 2013, 10:00:59 pm »
320x240 = 76800 pixels. Variables can be sent directly to the archive (thus, you can upload files larger than available RAM), but variables in the archive cannot exceed about 65500 bytes in contiguous size.

We need to get right on making Z80 a Z80 GIF decoder.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: TI web conference reveals new 84 Plus C Silver Edition information!
« Reply #40 on: February 10, 2013, 11:01:05 pm »
Calc84maniac on the PRIZM I saw pic files of about 1.8 KB in size. It depended of what was on the screen. Maybe it used RLE compression, though.

So basically a standard image of what I posted earlier would instead look like this:
« Last Edit: February 11, 2013, 12:16:51 am by DJ_O »
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