Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI-Nspire => Topic started by: willrandship on April 18, 2010, 12:35:43 am
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For those who don't know, devkitPro is a popular toolchain for developing of many handhelds, such as the GP2X, GBA, NDS, PSP and others. This is why it was so easy to port their homebrew across all the different devices.
Since the NSpire runs the same ARM9 code as the GBA, would it be possible to build asm programs using devkitpro? While there are not any libraries written as of yet, the code base would be the same, and it would allow us direct access to much other code. Also, certain libraries may be portable, such as graphics libraries. The more compatible libraries we write, the easier it is to code and port.
Anyone have any feedback? Comments? Questions? Criticisms? All are welcome! :P
William Shipley
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Hmmm...I see that devkitPro is also a gcc-based toolchain. It should be possible.
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Now, my main question: How would one go about setting it up?
I haven't had much experience programming in asm (none actually) but I think this would spur on much more development.
just a thought.....in the future, since the nspire has a rather powerful processor, on-calc asm programming could be feasible and rather speedy!
EDIT: would you happen to have a non-united TI link to the nspire emu? United TI is in the middle of its scheduled downtime.
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That would be nice if it actually made developement easier. ASM can be rather hard to program for because the code ends up so long. Libraries would be very welcome for people who prefer higher level programming rather than having to code 10 lines of code just to do a simple thing.
As for UTI it appears to work fine for me. I can access it fine at the moment. However, you need to register an account to download attachments there, which sucks. A copy of the emu, despite not being up to date, is available in our downloads section:
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=485
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The following links have the most recent versions.
Nspire emu by Goplat:
http://ti.bank.free.fr/modules/archives/download.php?id=1604&pseudo=
Modded version by Xspire who added the calc skin:
http://ti.bank.free.fr/modules/archives/download.php?id=1730&pseudo=
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Oh wait I forgot about TI-BANK having a copy x.x
However I never managed to understand how to get the calc skin version to work. I checked all help and even asked for some, and no one responded :/
So I stuck with Goplat's version and the annoyances of having to go through Command Prompt everytime to launch it.
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devkitpro also works on NDS. It would be nice but I don't know if it supports grayscale. Does it?
DJ, you can use a batch file instead of writing on command line everythime. I think in TI-bank archives there are some sets of them.
I would really enjoy to set up a Nspire development folder and start messing with it. It is like start everything from ground. Learn new things. But I should master other skills right now.
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Yeah, the links that I provided have those batch files. Try them DJ, I'm sure they'll greatly simplify your usage of the emulator.
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I guess I could try the batch files, but I won't write one myself cuz I don't even know how x.x
I wish they did a TI-Nspire emu that was as simple to start up as WabbitEmu. In wabbitemu all you do is double-click wabbitemu.exe, select a ROM image and you're set.
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The thing with DevkitPro is that each device you develop with has its own set of libraries. We would probably have to write our own input, link and display libraries to support grayscale.
Thanks for the emulator links. To write (or change) a batch file open it with notepad, and make sure to save it as a .bat. (unless you're running linux, then you can just edit and run the text files, but for windows commands make sure to use wine!)
EDIT: Sweet! There's a Linux version, and it works!!!!!
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yeah my issue though is the syntax for batch files. I tried following instructions on other sites before and it wouldn't work. often I would get invalid command errors. Windows XP and 7 x64, btw
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Hmm, it is case sensitive, isn't it?
BTW for DevkitPro to work, we need to write a lib that does the same things as libnds or libgba for the nspire. Everything else is there. libNDS has the following in it:
2D Engine API:
-General Video
-2D Sprites
-2D Backgrounds
3D Engine API:
-OpenGL (ish)
-Box Test
-Position Test
Audio API:
-Simple Sound Engine
-MaxMod
Math:
-Hardware Assisted Math
-Fixed Point Trigonometry Functions
Memory:
-General Memory Definitions
-NDS and GBA header Structure
-Direct Memory Access
System
-Custom DS types
-Hardware Initilization
-Bios
-ARM 9 Cache
-Interrupts
-Fifo
-Timers
User Input/ouput
-Keypad and Touch pad
-Keyboard
-Console and Debug Printing
Utility
-Decompression
-Image Manipulation
-PCX file loader
-General Purpose Data Structures
Custom Peripherals
-Rumble Pack
-DS Motion Pack
Debugging
-Debug via printf to DS screen or NO$GBA
-Send message to NO$GBA
Obviously, the Nspire Library would differ in many ways, but it shows what the Library needs to implement over the devkitARM core.
I got this chart from Here
http://libnds.devkitpro.org/ (http://libnds.devkitpro.org/)
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Hmm, it is case sensitive, isn't it?
idk, it could be because I got the french version of XP. For some reasons, I had trouble running softwares before and with command prompt and got trouble due to different language issue, even if it shouldn't happen.
But again I was born into GUIs, not command prompt, and am kinda illiterate about such low level stuff. Hence why in my 9 years of 83+ programming I had to stick with TI-BASIC and some Axe Parser.
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Hmm...I was born in '93, but we had a realy old computer with 3.1 on it. 3.1 was so bugged up it wouldn't even start, so I used MS-DOS. I was 4, and it was easy for me. I like text more than guis anyways. Half the time in linux I use the terminal anyways 8)
Never messed around much with other language windows. not much call for it here in good ol' utah
EDIT: Anyone want some source code? Here's LibNDS!!!!!
Would've been a tar.bz2 and 80 KB less, but those aren't allowed here.
Be warned, they have their own (short) license, so read it and make sure you follow their rules.
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It depends of people really. I only got my first computer in 2004 when I was 17, because it was too expensive for us (we got this one for free). Before that, we used computers once a week at school only to play math games, we did not mess around in Windows 3.1. When we moved to 95 and 98 all we did was image editing, websites and visual BASIC. I never got the time to mess around, plus even if I did my changes would have been reset everytime I restart anyway since admins installed Deep Freeze.
In other words I was always into GUIs and stuff and since I'm not a low level language person, this is why I could only really understand TI-BASIC well.
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too bad for you....my family got my computer from my grandfather, who was the equivalent of a nerd in his time.
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It depends of people really. I only got my first computer in 2004 when I was 17, because it was too expensive for us (we got this one for free). Before that, we used computers once a week at school only to play math games, we did not mess around in Windows 3.1. When we moved to 95 and 98 all we did was image editing, websites and visual BASIC. I never got the time to mess around, plus even if I did my changes would have been reset everytime I restart anyway since admins installed Deep Freeze.
In other words I was always into GUIs and stuff and since I'm not a low level language person, this is why I could only really understand TI-BASIC well.
Deep Freeze, I feel your pain. -.-
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Yeah, near the end of school year, once we finished our projects we could play Duke Nukem 3D, GTA2 and Starcraft, but had to reinstall them every class :/
Starcraft was so incredibly hard to install, too