Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI-Nspire => Topic started by: willrandship on July 31, 2010, 12:22:50 am
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I was just thinking, as i remembered a conversation with calc84maniac a while ago. He said he loaded his asm by sending the file as boot2 code (or something like that) and that gave me a thought. What would happen if you made an asm program that ran through that (or ndless) that would act like an OS, but when you turned it off, it would just go into a form of standby (kind of like the nspire already does :P) that way, it doesn't do any validation checks, and you run a custom os!
Sure, there would be problems, like when crashes occur it would need to be reinstalled. Still though, I think it would be much nicer than the regular nspire OS. Is there any way for ndless asm to permanently alter the calculator BIOS in such a way to make it sustainable?
Sorry if this was a bad idea. I would've used the IRC, but I've been kind of pressed for time lately, and forum topics are less demanding.
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Actually I've had somewhat of the same idea :P will it work?
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Well, with Ndless we can write our own boot loader to load a third-party OS, so that is possible.
RunOS exists, and can boot any Nspire OS version on a calculator running Ndless. Unfortunately, it is being delayed due to currently unknown issues.
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How was RunOS meant to be run (no pun intended) on the Nspire? Was it supposed to use Ndless?
EDIT: I can't anything about RunOS anywhere. Is there a project page for it?
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RunOS is an Ndless program.
The program is by the Ndless team, so its inner workings are kept secret and there is no project page.
There is a trailer on TI-Bank.
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Good answer, I'll add for the sake of completeness that the trailer on TI-Bank is modified from a trailer posted on yAronet months ago.
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To make things a little clearer:
RunOS is designed to specifically load official OS. It is a proof-of-concept and probably needs to be much reworked to be fully functional.
geogeo has temporary stop any work on TI-Nspire development, so I'm currently the only maintainer of Ndless and its related tools, and I first want to focus on Ndless.
We would certainly have to deal with legal issues if RunOS were to be released by threatening TI's revenue model. I don't want to see TI be motivated by this in the arms race.
Making a general OS loader for third-party OS is much more interesting, but not straight-forward: boot 2 checks the signature of the OS before loading it, so the official OS needs to be kept used as a trampoline. And of course boot 2 is signed and cannot be changed.
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I dont care about RunOS, ndless2 is vital right now, we need to beat back TI
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Well, if we don't ever care about getting the original OS running at the same time, then we don't need the boot2, right? With the z80 nspire emu coming, perhaps we could integrate it. (with permission from the devs, of course, and provide your own rom :P) Then, you have no fewer math functions than before, and no real reason to switch back to the nspire os!
qazz, while ndless2 will rock, This will beat back TI just as much (if not more)
Maybe we could port Octave and Xoctave for CAS, plus 3d graphing and more! The nspire can probably handle it.
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In theory, I think we can write an Ndless program to overwrite boot2 and TI's OS with our own. But then we'd need to insure a way to fall back to TI's OS in case of bugs.
We really should port a CAS to the Nspire. I was thinking of Eigenmath (written in C) or a Lisp-based system.
But this is all in the future, after the Nspire has a standard library. It is nearly impossible to port software without one (I've only seen one or two large programs that don't use the standard library at all).
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Well, if the boot2 is overwritten, can we still access the maintenance menu? if so, we can install a regular OS no problem. I mean, clearly calc84maniac had no trouble sending more programs to his nspire while developing, so I don't think we'll have any problems.
Not that I'm the expert on it :P
By standard library are you referring to the #include header files? DevkitARM comes with many such libs, for C and C++. Just look under DevkitARM/arm-eabi/include.
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I was just thinking, as i remembered a conversation with calc84maniac a while ago. He said he loaded his asm by sending the file as boot2 code (or something like that) and that gave me a thought.
This was on Goplat's emulator, long before Ndless was released and there was any way to run real programs. There is no way we can overwrite the boot2 on a real TI-Nspire unless we crack the RSA encryption (Goplat's emulator was skipping boot1, which validates boot2)
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Darn. Well, there's always ndless, then we do the same thing. Or, is there a way to change the boot1? that would be nice.
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Nope, boot1 is read-only.