Author Topic: A modern(ish) almost guide to installing fargo.  (Read 3361 times)

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Offline Jonson26

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A modern(ish) almost guide to installing fargo.
« on: October 02, 2020, 04:03:05 am »
So, I've owned a TI-92 for a while now, but I never got to install Fargo on it.
In case someone doesn't know what Fargo is, The TI-92 doesn't have built-in assembly support. Fargo is the jailbreak that enables you to run these programs.

This was not my first attempt however. For a long time I thought the issue was my cable (I have a USB silverlink), because when Fargo came out, the most common link cables were serial and parallel ones, but as it turns out, the issue was software-side. The thing is, TI-Connect doesn't support RAM backups, and that is the file we need to send to the calculator. On windows, we could theoretically use TILP, but the issue with this one is that the USB cable drivers that are available for that one are ancient, and I doubt they would work even on windows 7, tet alone 8 or 10. I tried, of course, but unfortunately Win10 totally refused to even recognise them.

The solution I found, was to install the precompiled TILP and libtiusb packages from the ubuntu repositories on my older laptop running lubuntu 16. As far as I know, these should be available on newer versions of ubuntu too.
This setup allows me to send RAM backups to my TI-92 with some caveats:
1. Apparently backing up and restoring the contents of the RAM somehow destroys the jailbreak.
2. TILP is massively unstable in this configuration. I've found that sending any file besides a RAM backup will almost certainly freeze the program midway through the operation.
These issues, while a little annoying can be circumvented pretty easily. For example, for sending files to the calculator, I use TI-Connenct on my day-to-day windows laptop, and I only bring out the linux machine (it's actually dual-boot) when I need to install Fargo.

Now, I did this, before WSL2 was out, and I also never tried out the serial link idea. I might try out these routes at a later date.

As a bottom line, I'd like to say, that I'm very impressed with how smooth fargo is. It really feels better than the ASM support included in later models by TI, and I have yet to have any crashes. On the other hand, I think I found a bug-thing: the longer the calculator runs, the more there are of those weird folders named 0001, 0002, 0003, 0004... They only appear in the ASM-based file browsers, so I'm not sure if this is a Fargo or TI-OS thing. Fortunately, as far as I know, a reset and reinstall fixes these every time. It is not a gamebreaker, it's juxt that they build up over time and appear at the top of the folder list, so if I want to open a program using the assembly shell, I have to scroll down over them.