On my TI Voyage 200, I wrote a program in Basic which I had to learn by googling. It calculated molecule stuff for Chemistry class. Before one exam, I showed it to my teacher and explained to him how I did it. I was then officially allowed to use the program in the exam, which is quite unbelievable. But I argued that in order to write the program, I obviously had to have understood the topic and math behind it - which could easily be demonstrated by going through the source code. And he agreed. Those memories I will never forget.
Wow, sounds like a good teacher. Not all of them understand what you need to know to write a program. Even if they didn't allow it, programming the concepts into a tool is a great way to study that concept.
@@owenevilmakings5433 I think that was the argument, that granted him the use. I used to code a little program which calculates every formula around linear algebra we knew back then I never asked for permission, but I sold it to my classmates for 0,50€. I thought it was like cheating, so I stopped doing it afterwards. But I see your point because it was my best math test ever.
@@moltengears7483 Maybe there exist non-native English speakers in the world who cannot be bothered to look into a dictionary each time they're unsure of a certain terminology. Guess I can take it as a compliment that you didn't think of this as a possibility... because you're surely not just being an ignorant dick
10:26 "No doubt, at least a few who got their start writing simple games to play during class were inspired to become professional software developers". Whew, that hit me in the feels...literally my story.
LOL! Same! I also have a friend that discovered his natural talents for programming on a TI-83. He was trying to clone Halo 2 and ended up creating a really cool map that generated unique mountain ranges.
I remember I really struggled with matrix operations in my Algebra II class, long ago, and ended up writing dozens of programs in TI-basic to solve the most common (and less common) problems. I had a late crisis of conscience, and just before taking my final, I revealed to my teacher what I'd done and asked if it would be okay. To his credit, he let me walk him through those programs- and then with a funny grin on his face, said that was just fine and I could use my tools for the test. I realize, now, that my writing those programs was all the demonstration he needed that I had learned what I needed to learn.
I remember when I installed Tetris on my TI-84 Plus CE, my teacher saw me using it while she was lecturing and said "put down your calculator, I know you're playing that fun game haha"
This puts memories for me too, especially after i switched schools where the fellow students only had a CASIO graphic calculator. I felt like a god among others for what my TI-83 could do and play when the others could just, well, calculate graphs. A calculator i still own and use to this day. Not just for gaming.
lol i have a classic nspire and once the maths teacher walked past and said 'thats a cool calculator' (most people in my class have casio fx83 or 85 or 991) and the person beside me told the teacher that i could play games on it and the teacher was like 'oh thats cool'
No, no he didn't. He downloaded an _operating system_ to run on his computer that poses as a calculator. The computer is hardware. You can't download hardware. The more you know...
The cx II works now! I recommend buying this one, it's a bit more expensive, but its improved cpu is able to run games at a faster speed, so snes and gba games are perfectly playable
@@wyatt1019 The ti84 CE is obsolete for gaming it's basically a 90s calculator on a new shell with a new screen I'd avoid and get the Nspire CX II or buy a TI89 Titanium/ Voyage 200 used for far less
@@wyatt1019 Why bother with a non CAS calculator at this point? Either get a Ti-36X Pro or a Nspire/HP Prime. No real reason to pay CAS calculator prices for a non-CAS calculator when you can get a 36X Pro that has even more functionality than the 84 in some use cases.
*human* I don’t think I’ve made it clear enough- they’ve banned phones _completely_ , meaning we aren’t even able to use them during breaks. Also just because we’re at school doesn’t mean we work and study 100% of the time- heck after we’ve done our yearly examinations most students _and teachers_ don’t do any focused studying for the rest of the year. I’m not even mentioning that it’s not just phones that are banned, but every electronic device- no smart watches, laptops, iPads, Nintendo switches, not even old gaming devices such as gamboys are allowed. There are _way_ more rules but I think you get it.
@@acatthatmakeseclairs Exactly as it sounds. Its an emulator, much like a game boy emulator or N64 emulator on PC, but for TI calculators, on phones or PC.
@@TechX1320 honestly I had no idea what an _emulator_ was, I know now so that’s fine, but yeah that’s way easier than doing all the stuff in the video.
How did you skip the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition successfully running Pokemon Blue/Red/Green/Yellow on some models? What an achievement. They were entirely playable but only on certain models that had more ram than others.
The first time I ever held a graphing calculator, It felt just right in my hands, and I understood immediately why the game boy was so beloved. Now i’m thinking about trying to find a good graphing calculator (relatively cheaply, oof) so I can play games on it. Also for math class, so it’s doubly important! :)
Lemme download a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator in to a calculator into my calculator
there is a 2d Minecraft for calculators, but it sucks... first of all 2d minecraft is bad as it is. the cursor is hard to get used to. the mobs can glitch through walls and kill you. creative mode is the only cool part, because you can basically draw things using Minecraft blocks. it takes up way too much space as well, but honestly the person who worked on it clearly spent a lot of time, so ill give em credit.
The first time I saw a graphing calculator and saw it draw a curve, I thought that maybe it was possible to make an animation on it. I did not know people programmed full on GAMES on it. And I appreciate the persistence of those people to keep trying to overcome the resistance the company kept throwing their way.
I remember seeing my friends in high school (early 2000's) playing games on their TI calculators. I set to figuring out how to do it, did exactly like in this video, and used that ZShell website. It was such a fun time with Newgrounds and pre-youtube before Google ruled the world.
Most likely used a computer for a full fledged game but pong wouldn't be too hard to write out and compiled on the calc. I'm thinking about purchasing a graphical calculator, partly to finish math courses for higher education and do some programming on it!
Finally a video that actually talks about the community and its relationahip with TI, instead of just saying "oooo look, mario on my CE". Props to the creator for actually doing his research.
I spent the majority of my HS time (and math classes) programing these. I started with Basic and quickly moved to ASM. I wish I still had the source for some of the games I wrote. Mostly RPG's and ways to manage memory. I built and wrote a memory extender using a serial//ttl driven flash chip, and even built a 2400 baud modem I could plug in to the serial port. I would sit in the back of my math class near the exposed patch panel on wall, Aligator clip to the panel and surf Local BBS's on my TI-85 during the class. Nothing says nerd like playing TradeWars or L.O.R.D on a T-85.
I'm also curious ^. I saw the outlines of some pretty cool projects like that, but never actually "met" someone who did; that's snazzy as heck (to give an idea of how far it has come, last night someone had a webserver on their TI-84+CE. Kids these days.)
I use to sell these in school. $150 - $200 per unit. We could pick any lock. 2 man job. First my friends goes and picks all the locks then I go take all the calculators. In high school everybody knew if you want a calculator come see me and I'll do you a good price.
I watched this video somewhere 1 or 2 years ago, this inspired me to get a graphing calculator. I now have 2, 1 more powerful, with a ROMhack of Mario, called Oiram, and a less powerful one to be borrowed mostly. Thank you man for making me inspired.
@@_bit_ still a personal computer though. Calling it Mac os doesn't negate that fact lol. Mac OS is nothing special so why not make PC OS the generic term for computer operating systems.
@@michealpersicko9531 Mac OS runs on a custom kernel and graphics system based on BSD. Windows runs on its own libraries built from the ground up. They're completely different software, targeted to the same architecture.
They broke into the market by offering the software for Schools for free then forcing the cost onto students when they were required to purchase the calculators. This is how Casio and HP were locked out and almost non existent in the school calculator market. There's an in-depth video on it.
I'm 25 and the t-83 is what got me into programming. my first game was given to all my classmates to such success the school ordered everyone delete off their calculators. it was a simple platformer that generated random levels using the same code from a probability calculator app to generate the random levels. it was simple but got us thru math class.
Basically the cost comes from.... 1. 1990s Calculater war. 2. TI gets contract with government to write standards for calculator operation for the classroom. 3. TI proceeds to make a product that fits that standard exactly. 4. PATENTS the design made accordance to their recommendations. 5. PROFIT.
Ah, I remember the fun I had with my nspire when I was in school. I was the only one in my class with one, and I feel like that wouldn't have been the case if my classmates knew just how capable it was. It was fun being able to take my test using my calculator, then play pokemon on it immediately afterwards. Even had a dual-boot system on it that could boot it in CAS or non-CAS mode, although I mostly had that simply because I could, and because I found the thought of being able to upgrade my calculator just like that funny.
zshell. That brings back memories. A guy in my pre-calculus class had a nervous breakdown during a midterm when he realized that the modifications he put in place so that he could play games was returning incorrect results for trigonometric functions. Luckily our prof was old school and insisted that we all be able to do the work without the use of calculators and he didn't end up failing the class.
I would be really interested to see what modifications he made, since zshell only overwrote one address in the ROM to add a jump directly to RAM where zshell was stored as a string variable. It shouldn't affect other ROM routines like built in math functions.
I had a Casio. Made a real time fighting game on it without any knowledge of how to code or else. Those class where teachers were just reading a book was where I did that. It was fun and eventually made me want to learn more about code and stuff
There were plenty of games for the Casio's we had at school, but yeah not as many as a TI would have. Likely because afaik TI's are the standard in schools in the USA, whereas here in Aus we use whatever.
Do you remember synthetic programming on a HP41, where you can create whole new machine code out of text strings by deleting the string marker code at the beginning of a string? They had an extra rare module to do that.
I like mini documentaries on subjects like this. It's an original concept on RU-vid, where you always see the same topics over and over. Especially when it comes to gaming.
I have a TI-84 that I’ve used for classes since high school, knew some games were stored in memory, but as a computer and game console enthusiast, I’m absolutely blown away by the support of a device that I thought to be primitive. Really impressed, wondering what I can do with mine now!
I had a TI-84 Pulse SE in high school. Boy I loved that thing. A bunch of us collaborated to make a program with all our physics formulas and we shared with with anyone who had a TI-83 and above. Made that class much easier. I put so many games on it as well, including a "port" of fruit ninja. In collage I had the Nspire-CX. Doom and the PDF viewer saved my sanity and my grades.
You forgot to mention the most important fact, some models are accepted at exams... so obviously students found ways to use them to cheat. I loved to use my 89 to help me remember formulas and stuff. The most extreme trick I remember was to put an 89 board into an 83 case, because the 83 was accepted but the 89 wasn’t, as it had a lot more memory.
"People want to buy our calculators to use for amateur games programming." "They want to WHAT! Buy our calculators!!?!? This cannot stand!" Wait, what?
When I was in school I was given a CASIO graphing calculator. It didn't have anywhere near the software support of the TI calculators, but it had programming capabilities so I got to work. I didn't make anything incredible, but after making some basic math programs (like a fibonacci sequence program) I managed to make a basic program where you were an asterisk and you could move around the screen. Looking back, it wasn't mind-blowing, but at the time I was very proud of what I could accomplish if I got distracted in my precalc class.
Excellent video! Programming TI-BASIC and Z80 assembly on the early TI calculators was fun. These machines were slow and underpowered, but much like the early days of home computing, the limitations of the hardware fostered remarkable creativity in budding programmers.
I'm no programmer but what a missed opportunity to get students interested in coding. I still remember a few friends and I just fell in love with these (Ti83) after first getting them to bring them home in jr high. We would spend soooo many hours writing code for our new games and share them with each other for improvements (clout 🤓). I think I've figured out why I'm obsessed with holding onto AAA batteries.
When I was student at University, I learnt to code on Matlab. I quickly managed to try these code on my then old TI 89. I realised then how powerful and deep was the code language of this calculator !
I have worked as a software engineer since 2007. Some of my first programming was on my TI-83 Plus so I could do my algebra homework quicker. My teacher was really supportive and said if I understood it enough to make a program for it, I could do it. I bet my life would be pretty different he said it was cheating instead.
I was an intern in the TI calculator group in the mid-1990s. One of the things that I worked on was a proof-of-concept of getting GCC to cross-compile to the 68K-based TI-89/TI-92. TI still had the mentality of a hardware company selling consumer electronics, rather than a software company building a platform for third-party developers, though, and as the video says, never followed through with delivering an SDK.
Wow, what a great video! You did a great job capturing the roughly five-year period between 1995 and 2000 where the TI calculator landscape was the cutting edge of hacking for high school students! I remember many nights staying up way too late on ICQ chatting with others in the TI community about some new upcoming game or shell!
I've been a programmer my whole career and it all started for me on my TI-83 Plus in middle school. I used to make games in TI-Basic and shared them with my friends and even carried around the reference manual for the calculator like a real nerd. I even tried to get into programming assembly for the z80 but it was a bit over my head as a kid. I didn't realize at the time you could write C and target for z80. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't started on that TI-83 Plus though!
Impossible for 3 reasons 1. thhe only way to do it is to spend 3 grand for the TI Nspire Navigator system which is a wifi module that plugs into the top and allows wifi capabilities on the Nspire but you can only buy in bulk because it's meant for classrooms only and costs about 3000 bucks 2. There probably would be a lot of lag since the calculator's cpu probably can't handle texting as well as your smartphone can because it was never designed to in the first place. 3. the keyboard is alphabetically laid out not QWERTY so have fun trying to send a text hunting and pecking on a keyboard with keys about the size of half a tic tac
@@Wertyhappy27 he is talking about how you can get the text you type to somebody without a physical connections ... you have no SIM, No Wi-Fi (unless you pay over $3000 for it) , no radio , or any means to transfer data ... unless someone could offer a hacked walkie talkie like module that can be stealthy hidden inside the device, to receive and transmit data to an other module linked to a mobile phone or laptop.
Its a graphic calculator programmable.... It is very fun At classroom😅but the price of this machine is very very high (could be 180 $) for just a calculator
Subsequent models made it progressively easier to write software in assembly though TI never made much available in terms of documentation. Enthusiasts still had to pull a lot together on their own but the time period of the late 90’s still managed to become a bit of a golden era in calculator gaming. Some were re-creations of well known titles like Tetris while others were original to the platform.
In college I used to play Doom on my calculator with a buddy of mine. I didn't learn calculus but I had a great time doing deathmatch over serial cable.
When I was in highschool and moved on to classes that needed a graphing calculator, my mom couldn’t afford a TI-83 or TI-84, so my first ever graphing calculator was a TI-82. That calculator got me through algebra 2 and physics, but ended up dying, and I was able to borrow my neighbor’s TI-85, which I remember being significantly different software-wise from the 82 and even the 83 and 84 variants.
I had the TI83+, and remember fondly gaming on it, even one of my math teachers had his own program we would use to destroy any test and it would show workings, also in uni days it was easy to store info to retrieve during exams, as teachers were useless at tech
I remember a couple of years ago while solving an engineering exam, everyone in the class had a TI nspire CX CAS, wheter their own or borrowed from another student...I was the only one using a CASIO fx570...and as you can imagine I failed myserably due to time restrictions, I had to calculate all the matrix on paper and obsviously many students just saved pdf files with the notes in those calculators...
For a brief time, TI-83+SE and TI-84+ calculators were actually manufactured with 128KB RAM instead of 32KB/48KB. A programmer found out and added a way to emulate some of the older calcs. I guess TI switched manufacturing plants though, and they (correctly) switched to 48KB RAM :(
Dang i didn't even know about this. When I was going through high school the ti82 came out and I got into programming pretty heavily. Now I'm a software developer and without these calculators back in the day I would not be here. Glad to see there is something better now, but it think with to much power people will cheat and just import rather than create. There are still those of use that dream in code and we'll always be around.
The TI-Nspire CX II, released in 2019, has a powerful cpu that is capable enough of playing Game Boy Advance games at about the same frame rate as the actual handheld itself. While most 3D video games tend to have extremely slow frame rates once ported to modern day graphing calculators, that may as well be a trend for all of 2020s calculator gaming. The TI-Nspire CX III may have a cpu that is powerful enough to run 3D video games at a high frame rate. Then again, the CX III may only be able to run Nintendo DS games. According to my assumptions, I predict that the CX III may come out sometime in 2031. To know why this is the case, my assumptions are that it took 4 years to release the TI-Nspire CX, and 8 years to release the TI-Nspire CX II. So my prediction is that it’ll take 12 years (or 9 years now…) to release the CX III, because every time a new version of the CX comes out, the release date of the next version of the CX is pushed back by 4 years. But once the CX III comes out, I’ll guarantee you that 2030s kids will be laughing in the back of math class while they’re playing Super Mario 64 DS on their CX III’s lol.
I used to be that programmer back in the late 90's and early 2000's for Ti83 plus. I used to make games that were hybrid between ASM and Basic and most of my games were RPG and it took up all memory. I believe I was the only one who made story and cutscenes with the calculator back in the day.
Games are great and all, but one of my favorite hobbies is writing code, and I love being able to do it right on the calculator! Too bad there are no apps to let me code in C or something and compile it on the go! I have a TI-83+ Silver Edition and a Voyage 200, and man if either of them got access to a real compiler I'd be stoked! And yes, I'm sure lots of people want to lecture me about why it's impossible on the limited hardware power, but A GUY CAN DREAM OK??
Damn this brought me back.. 35 now and player a Mario game on the ti that had a level builder with it so you could make levels for the Mario game. Literally was all I did for some classes for years
The first game system that was not a game system that I ever saw was a MAME emulator running on a high end DSLR camera. It was very impressive, especially for the time (late nineties). It could only run certain old school ROMs, such as Pacman or Donkey Kong (and had no sound), but still pretty freaking impressive!
I still have my old TI-83 plus.. I actually came across it the other day and it still worked and still had some of my old games and programs on there.. haha.. good times
I had the CX CAS back when I was graduating from college in Germany. Not only is it cat and mice with TI, but also with the teachers. For sure we always turned it into "exam" mode. Good times.
Interesting - all the way until my Abitur I've only had to use the exam mode exactly once! And that time our teacher f-ed up by putting his own calculator into exam mode as well.
I used to code extensively for the 83 over two decades ago. Learned about assembly and efficient code on that thing. Also the "Send(9prgmPROGRAMNAME" command will launch assembly directly. No shell needed. Good video. It was truly a golden age for calculators. At my school, the gifted math students were given 92+ models. Those ran doom lol.
