Hey, I want to talk to angels on my calculator. Pity I've got an 89.

<dumb>Doesn't it require a heaven driver and a supernatural shell?</dumb>

Naturally

*Supernaturally

I'm still upset that they don't sell the TI-86 anymore...

I liked the 86's interface more than any others =/

They still sell them. At the fred meyer they still have a bunch.

They actually still sell them on TI's online store as well. And it wasn't two weeks ago that I saw one in Target at work. Ov course it was near the bottom and the 89ti's were eye level....

Well, that is not TI's doing, that is marketing. You put the latest and greatest on top, as well as the most expensive, so that is what people see first, and that is what they buy.

-W-

I like the 86 the most in general (at least among the Z80 calcs)...

last year in math someone said that there was some bug whith the 86 but I don't know how they knew that

See link.

I think the 86 is great for everything but BASIC programming. I tried the same routines on it that I use for 83+, and it was about 3 times slower. Is this normal?

Optimization is different on the TI-86, mainly because there are more functions. You probably can replace some code blocks with single functions, although I don't know what the specific code is. Replacing blocks of low-level routines with one high-level routine obviously will obviously work better.

P.S.:I don't know anything about the TI-86 token headers.

<:(>Delete the second-to-the-last 'obviously'-sorry</:(>

The 86 is indeed slower because it has so much RAM that the RAM has to be divided into pages, which are swapped in and out as they are accessed. A lot of page swapping occurs while running a BASIC program, so it slows things down a lot.

On the older calculators with only 32K RAM, only the ROM had to be page switched. On Z80 calcs with more than 32K RAM, both RAM and ROM have to be page-switched.

No, no, no! The paging doesn't slow it down much...it's the so-called "typable tokens" that decrease the speed. It has to convert the text to tokens (on the 83+, the tokens are directly inserted when editing the prog).

IIRC the tokens are pre-converted; after editing a program, the first time you try to execute it, there'll be a notable delay, because it's converting the typed tokens to real tokens. During execution, this should not influence anything whatsoever.

That is correct.

You're right, my brain must have been turned off that day. :-D

However, I *really* don't think that the paging is what slows down the execution...

Sounds interesting. I'll have to try the new 83+ OS.

Uh..."viewing angels"? 120d :-D

Somehow I don't think that the 84SE will look good with a pink faceplate. I mean, the back is still silver, right?

Well, if you look at the image here, or at the other ones on the site, the colors are more pastel and close to silver, so they match nicely. But for the TI-89Ti...

If you look at the pictures online of the TI-84 SE it looks silver, but it's really such a light shade of gray, it's almost white. And the face plate it comes white is graphite, which is so plain. I'm all for the face plates, although I plan on getting blue.