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Calculator Community => Major Community Projects => The Axe Parser Project => Topic started by: willrandship on September 10, 2012, 01:27:42 am

Title: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: willrandship on September 10, 2012, 01:27:42 am

I had a bit of a crazy thought: What if there was an OS that had a similar memory layout to TI-OS, but removed a lot of useless 'features' and had a lot of optimizations for speed/space, as well as being better for axe runtimes? (Ie have the same effect as Axe Fuzion, and have management menus for axioms, etc.

Legally, as long as only a patch is released, there's no illegal file sharing (aka warez :P)

However, this is where I get curious: Just how closely does Axe Parser interact with the OS? Does it, for example, use any bcalls? IIRC, getkeyr is an example.

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: TIfanx1999 on September 10, 2012, 02:47:33 am

Runer would be the one to ask,but I'm sure it uses rom calls. Text display is one iirc. The question would be how many rom calls it uses. The other thing to keep in mind is that axe uses a lot of free ram spaces, so you'd have to ensure that those stayed in the exact same area or make sure the adresses are adjusted to point at the new free ram areas (though theywould need to remain the same size). Im not sure how feasible such a project would be. If you were to do such a thing it would require a lot of reworking.

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: willrandship on September 10, 2012, 03:06:17 am

I'd think the Free RAM areas could increase in size, they just couldn't decrease.

Another thing that wouldn't be able to change would be hooks. Axe uses quite a few of those IIRC.

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: Deep Toaster on September 11, 2012, 02:17:49 pm

I think Axe actually avoids bcalls as much as possible (except for the obvious ones like text display and key detection).

I don't know of Axe using any hooks, except for tokens in editing, but I could easily be wrong.

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: Keoni29 on September 11, 2012, 02:37:09 pm

Axe software can mess up your calc's ram if it alters ram outside of buffers. (happened to me several times)

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: shmibs on September 11, 2012, 04:25:07 pm

what parts of the OS would you want to remove?

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: Eiyeron on September 11, 2012, 04:28:16 pm

ANything except asm programs?

Title: Re: How closely tied is Axe to the TI-OS?
Post by: ralphdspam on September 11, 2012, 05:23:12 pm

I guess you could remove the graphing stuff and the security (signing and validation) stuff. 

One could design an OS with minimum BCALL support that only supports managing and running assembled programs.