Omnimaga

Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: Adriweb on April 10, 2013, 03:29:32 pm

Title: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Adriweb on April 10, 2013, 03:29:32 pm
In a previous news item, you could discover ahead of time on TI-Planet the latest beta of the new TI-Connect 4.0 linking software, adding support for the 84+ C Silver Edition calculator to the existing TI-Z80 and TI-68k support.

More precisely, the showcased version was 4.0.0.209.

Tonight, the final version, TI-Connect 4.0.0.218 was released. It represents the first update of the TI-Connect software for Windows since 2010!

(http://tiplanet.org/forum/gallery/image.php?album_id=144&image_id=2270)

You can now transfer images and install OS upgrades to your 84+ C Silver Edition from Windows!
(with the official software, that is - the third-party TILP II 1.17 software, which was recently published, already enabled doing it, provided the .8c? files were renamed to .8x?)


One other thing :

For a few days (http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=11525) already, you were able to download, in exclusivity on TI-Planet, the OS v4.0 for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition!

Indeed, a little tool by Critor was capable to create installable OS files from a ROM image of the calculator.

In the previous news (http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11550), TI-Connect 4.0 for Windows just came out.
And like all the Windows versions of TI-Connect, it comes with a bundle of device-installable OS files, and here with the OS 4.0 for the brand new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

After an hexadecimal comparison of the files ignoring the headers, we can see that this OS 4.0's code is 100% identical that the one running on my sample TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition.

Consequently, the OS bundled with TI-Connect 4.0 also suffers from all the bugs (http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11281) we noticed in our review some weeks ago. :(

The same goes for the 4.0 OS file available on TI's site (http://education.ti.com/en/us/software/details/en/5F0CBAC101194542B16B80BCE6CB3602/ti-84-plus-c-silver-edition-operating-system), which is the same as TI-Connect 4.0 's one :(


Enjoy!


Links:
TI-Connect 4.0.0.218 (English version) (http://education.ti.com/en/us/software/details/en/14D11109C9F44D55B9BBF65E5A62E7F1/swticonnectsoftwareforwindows)
OS 4.0 - TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition (http://education.ti.com/en/us/software/details/en/5F0CBAC101194542B16B80BCE6CB3602/ti-84-plus-c-silver-edition-operating-system6)


Source : http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11551&lang=en and http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11550&lang=en
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 03:33:35 pm
adriweb I thought it was cancelled and that they would require us to spend an extra $1200-3000 on a mac as a secret attempt to finance Apple? O.O

Just kidding, I am glad this is out. Since 2007, TI adopted a strategy that involves releasing calcs before everything is even ready at all. Eg the Nspire lacked BASIC language entirely in its first OSes and the 84+CSE had no official way for transfering programs using Windows/Mac. Even the emulator isn't out.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Lionel Debroux on April 10, 2013, 03:36:33 pm
Quote
Since 2007, TI adopted a strategy that involves releasing calcs before everything is even ready at all. Eg the Nspire lacked BASIC language entirely in its first OSes and the 84+CSE had no official way for transfering programs using Windows/Mac.
Yeah, it's unbelievable TILP provided working, partial 84+CSE support to Windows users several weeks before official software did.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 03:40:12 pm
Indeed. It seems they want to rush things just to get extra sales faster in case another company releases something new for school year. But again doing this ensures that most international stores will carry the item in stock in time for school year.

The TI-84+CSE had known bugs for months before official release, yet they aren't fixed in the current OS. Kerm let them know about them, but are they even gonna bother fixing bugs if they are not related to educational stuff? (eg Pt-On colors don't work, but they are mostly used in games, not math)

The PRIZM suffered from the exact same problem with Locate (took 1 year to fix).

The Nspire had numerous bugs in its initial OS that were fixed, but new bugs arrive everytime and to date, both the Nspire and 84+ line has bugs that have been around for half a decade.

Because of this, I wonder if TI-Connect 4.0 will even work lol. Also is Windows 98, 2000 and XP supported by TI-Connect 4.0?
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: TIfanx1999 on April 10, 2013, 04:02:31 pm
Nice to see they got around to this. It's still pretty early too as the calc hasn't seen a "wide release" yet.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 04:20:17 pm
One thing to point out:

Since SourceCoder saves 84C pictures with 84+ extensions (8xi instead of 8ci), you must manually change the extension. However don't do this from File->Open in TI-Connect, else the file disappears, so you have to close File->Open then reopen it again.

Also TI-Connect won't let you convert images to pictures, you can only convert to background images. So if you want pictures you need to use SourceCoder. The conversion in SourceCoder is not too bad: Just make sure that colors are saturated enough, else they become gray (eg the yellow in the Illusiat text below):

(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/PIC2.PNG)
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Sorunome on April 10, 2013, 05:05:14 pm
You and your illusiat ^^
So, what about OS3? Why didn't they ever do that?
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 05:09:58 pm
Lol that pic is kinda old. It was made back when I thought that bg images were at that resolution. Here's the original by the way:

(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/illusiat12hire2s.png)

Not sure about OS 3.0. I'm thinking that they might have wanted to avoid confusion with the Nspire OSes.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DrDnar on April 10, 2013, 09:14:11 pm
Here's a screenshot of TI Device Explorer.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 10:59:26 pm
Lol fail indeed. I haven't tried this one though so I can't tell. Sending stuff to my calc seems to work, though (I tried via send to TI device, with pics, apps, nethams and programs.)
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Sorunome on April 10, 2013, 11:11:24 pm
That just shows how good TI is at making software ^^
BTW, does TILP already support the new file formats?
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Lionel Debroux on April 11, 2013, 01:44:36 am
The brand-new .8ca format is not supported yet by the libraries underlying TILP, but the .8ci, .8ck and .8cu are, provided one renames them to .8xi, .8xk and .8xu (for now, that will be improved).
TILP II 1.17 and the latest release candidates thereof effectively provided Windows users working, partial 84+CSE support before official software did. It's not the first time TILP (libti*) is ahead of official software for a short while: in the summer of 2011, I added CX screenshot support and CX OS upgrade support to what became TILP II 1.16. The contemporary TINCLS 1.4 didn't support them.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 11, 2013, 01:46:21 am
Do you think there will ever be a way to dump a ROM via direct USB?
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Lionel Debroux on April 11, 2013, 02:08:27 am
Sure: we've already had ASM programs running for a while, but the DBUS and DUSB ROM dumpers were not ported for the 84+CSE yet.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 11, 2013, 02:11:53 am
Ok, just making sure that things like ROM8x are still possible.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Lionel Debroux on April 11, 2013, 02:21:33 am
ROM8x is still possible, indeed, which makes for at least 5 possible ways to dump a calculator:
* ASM programs running on the calculator and dumping some pages to files, which can then be retrieved with TI-Connect / TILP and used with ROM8x-type tools;
* DBUS ROM dumping as implemented for other TI-Z80 and TI-68k models in libticalcs (not done yet);
* DUSB ROM dumping as implemented for B/W 84+(SE) in libticalcs (not done yet);
* 83+ family memory page dump DBUS command (Jonimus' dumper, based on his titools patches I integrated into libticalcs), slower than the other libticalcs ROM dumpers because it does not optimize pages containing highly redundant content. That command doesn't exist in the TI-68k series (at least, in AMS 3.10 for 89T), it wouldn't work the exact same way anyway;
* even ASM programs printing the memory contents to the screen, and then computer-side OCR on the movie (similar to TI-80 and TI-81) - slow, cumbersome, error-prone method of last resort if there were none of the 4 other ways, but possible nonetheless.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: critor on April 11, 2013, 10:45:37 am
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 03:33:35 pm
Since 2007, TI adopted a strategy that involves releasing calcs before everything is even ready at all.

So it's up to us - let's resume TI's work and release patches/fixes for the current TI-84+C OS bugs like we allready did for the TI-83+/84! ;)
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 11, 2013, 11:14:45 pm
Quote from: Lionel Debroux on April 11, 2013, 02:21:33 am
ROM8x is still possible, indeed, which makes for at least 5 possible ways to dump a calculator:
* ASM programs running on the calculator and dumping some pages to files, which can then be retrieved with TI-Connect / TILP and used with ROM8x-type tools;
* DBUS ROM dumping as implemented for other TI-Z80 and TI-68k models in libticalcs (not done yet);
* DUSB ROM dumping as implemented for B/W 84+(SE) in libticalcs (not done yet);
* 83+ family memory page dump DBUS command (Jonimus' dumper, based on his titools patches I integrated into libticalcs), slower than the other libticalcs ROM dumpers because it does not optimize pages containing highly redundant content. That command doesn't exist in the TI-68k series (at least, in AMS 3.10 for 89T), it wouldn't work the exact same way anyway;
* even ASM programs printing the memory contents to the screen, and then computer-side OCR on the movie (similar to TI-80 and TI-81) - slow, cumbersome, error-prone method of last resort if there were none of the 4 other ways, but possible nonetheless.

And I assume that doing it via direct USB would be possible, right? Because via silver link it's incredibly slow. I liked how fast (and reliable) it was with ROM8x.
Quote from: critor on April 11, 2013, 10:45:37 am
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 10, 2013, 03:33:35 pm
Since 2007, TI adopted a strategy that involves releasing calcs before everything is even ready at all.

So it's up to us - let's resume TI's work and release patches/fixes for the current TI-84+C OS bugs like we allready did for the TI-83+/84! ;)

Indeed. :P However this time with some slower commands we will also need some extra ASM libs like the 160x240 mode so that BASIC coders (who will most likely be the largest coder base on this calc) can take advantage of it too.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: FloppusMaximus on April 12, 2013, 12:00:57 am
Well, I've finally tracked down all the undocumented system addresses BrandonW used in his DUSB ROM dumper, and it seems to be working now. :)  The DBUS dumper is also working (much faster than tidump, naturally, though not as fast as DUSB.)

However, in both cases, remotely launching the program is causing problems.  At least part of the problem, I think, is that the homescreen is just *so slow.*  In the case of the DUSB dumper, remote launching seems to work in Classic mode but not in Mathprint mode.  For the DBUS dumper, it fails in both modes.  I'll have to play around more to figure this out.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: Lionel Debroux on April 12, 2013, 02:09:04 am
Quote
And I assume that doing it via direct USB would be possible, right?
Yup, that was the third item in my list, although it was slightly obscured by the fact I used "DUSB" to match the convention in the libticalcs sources. "DBUS" is the classic protocol on legacy I/O, "DUSB" is the 84+ / 89T direct USB protocol.

Benjamin: great to see you've ported the ROM dumpers, but I'm disappointed (well, once again, and certainly not for the last time) by the slowness of the 84+CSE... For DBUS, would using the 0xCA command help ?
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DrDnar on April 12, 2013, 03:19:39 am
The signaling rate of the Silverlink, if I remember correctly, is limited by TI to about 2 Kbyte/s, so half-an-hour for a complete dump is about right. You could make it considerably faster by adding logic that detects and avoids unused pages, or just hard-coding the sectors of the ROM unlikely to be important. A blacklink might get considerably higher throughput under some circumstances, but since you can't (by design) maintain complete CPU control in the protected and fully-preemptive environment that all modern OSes provide, the link may be less stable at high speeds.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 14, 2013, 02:40:08 am
Good to hear that work is being done on this. :) As for the ROM dumping, I wonder if it will ever be possible to do it via direct link via an alternative to the home screen?  It sucks that the slow calc speed hinders this.
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: FloppusMaximus on April 14, 2013, 04:19:40 pm
Lionel: In fact, the 89/CA commands would, I think, have the same problem that the DUSB remote control command has: namely, that after you send the command, the calc then types out "Asm(prgmROMDUMP)", one token at a time, on the homescreen, which (owing to MathPrint combined with the slow LCD driver) means it takes a second or two for the program to actually be launched.  I increased the delay in calc_84p.c to 3 seconds and it seems to work now.

The issue with the DBUS dumper was a different one.  In that case, I was using the internal link routines (linksw.asm) rather than the system ones - the internal routines don't work when the link assist is enabled.  (The OS automatically disables the link assist when it's idle, which is why the program worked when I launched it manually.)  Still, nice to know that the software method still works. :)

DrDnar: What you describe (skipping unused areas) is essentially what we do with the TILP ROM dumping protocol.  It would also be possible, in theory, to add an option in TILP to dump only the OS and skip the archive/apps completely.  I think, though, that the standard behavior of dumping a complete Flash snapshot is a useful one (and it avoids any possible problems with future OSes, from TI or third parties, that occupy a different subset of Flash.)

DJ: The issue was really just with the remote program launching; once it's launched, the ROM dumper itself is plenty fast enough.  When I tried it before it took about 3 minutes to dump over USB and about 4 minutes with the SilverLink.  (My archive is still mostly empty, though; a calc with a lot of programs installed will take significantly longer.  I also haven't timed the latest version.)
Title: Re: TI-Connect 4.0 and 84C OS 4.0 released !
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 14, 2013, 11:12:35 pm
Also is it possible to make a ROM dumper not overly sensitive to any computer CPU usage spikes? On Cemetech there is a SilverLink ROM dumper but I can't get past page 5 or 6 most of the time and the farthest I ever got was 1F (and it was after setting the ROM dumper process to real time), because it stops dumping if my computer CPU usage increases by 0.000000000000001%.