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Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: critor on February 23, 2013, 10:49:57 am

Title: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: critor on February 23, 2013, 10:49:57 am

In a previous news (http://ourl.ca/18399) we started to address the performance of the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition with ticalc.org (http://ticalc.org).

But before even speaking of the TI-Basic and asm performance, let's have a look at the system menus behaviour.



Firstly the MODE menu. Its display was almost instantaneous on the TI-83 Plus. It was a little slowed down on the the faster TI-84 Plus because of the use of small font.

Now on TI-84 Plus Silver Edition C it needs almost one second to display! :O
Its display is so slow that it becomes perfectly feasible to take a photo with half the menu:

(http://tiplanet.org/forum/gallery/image.php?mode=medium&album_id=144&image_id=1980) (http://tiplanet.org/forum/gallery/image_page.php?image_id=1980)

Now for the system menus using the large font.
Navigating through those menus was instantaneous on the old TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus. But now on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition we see clearly see the refresh from top to bottom.

This means in particular that we can not use the calculator on the same typing speed as the old calculators. We must wait until the screen refresh is completed, or some keypresses are going to be ignored.

For example in the video below, I press four times the right arrow at the same speed on TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition to navigate the menus. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ignores half of my keypresses! :O

I admit that it is quite painful when using the TI-Basic editor in insert mode or when you are at the bottom of the screen, but maybe it's because I'm too accustomed to previous TI-z80 models and a new user wouldn't mind?



If there is no way to improve this speed, it would be nice to create a buffer capable of storing a list of unhandled keypresses, which will have to be processed in order later, once the cpu is available again - it allready existed in the early 1990s on the HP-48 calculators.

Video of the test:

Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11302&lang=en

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: blue_bear_94 on February 23, 2013, 11:29:44 am

Quote from: critor on February 23, 2013, 10:49:57 am

This means in particular that we can not use the calculator on the same typing speed as the old calculators. We must wait until the screen refresh is completed, or some keypresses are going to be ignored.

For example in the video below, I press four times the right arrow at the same speed on TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition to navigate the menus. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ignores half of my keypresses! :O

I admit that it is quite painful when using the TI-Basic editor in insert mode or when you are at the bottom of the screen, but maybe it's because I'm too accustomed to previous TI-z80 models and a new user wouldn't mind?

Same for the TI-89 Titanium...
The CSE isn't the only model with this problem. However, the 68k series's key delay can still be fixed.

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: Lionel Debroux on February 23, 2013, 11:35:12 am

On the TI-68k series, tiosmod+amspatch alleviates the performance problems, and we can re-sign the OS for seamless transfer.
The 84+CSE might just have OS upgrades signed with overly long keys (and thereby poor validation time), which makes the re-signing part harder.

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: blue_bear_94 on February 23, 2013, 11:37:46 am

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on February 23, 2013, 11:35:12 am

On the TI-68k series, tiosmod+amspatch alleviates the performance problems, and we can re-sign the OS for seamless transfer..

That's what I meant by the performance problems being "fixable."
However, we can still send our user-made OSes on emulators, and we don't need to send them to our actual calcs.

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: Sorunome on February 23, 2013, 03:44:02 pm

Wow, the mode menu is slow O.O
Maybe it would speed up if they would draw everything to a buffer, making it only to be recalled once....

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: Ranman on February 23, 2013, 05:50:31 pm

Gee wiz... that thing is slooooooooooow!

Title: Re: TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition menus performance test
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 23, 2013, 06:19:56 pm

Actually from videos I didn't find the mode menu to be unbearably slow, but it could definitively be annoying if you have to access it a lot.