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Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
Posted by Astrid on 22 April 2011, 00:59 GMT

Xavier Andréani and Lionel Debroux have brought it to our attention that the TI-Nspire OS version 3 upgrade will update Boot2 as well, preventing downgrading to previous versions of the Nspire OS. This means, if you upgrade to an unpatched v.3 in order to play around with Lua, you won't be able to use Nleash and Ndless ever again. Additionally, I have been told that the unpatched OS v.3 has been found to occasionally brick calculators.

Recently, Xavier, Sam101, Levak, Codeslicer, Critor2000, and Lionel released TNOC on TI-Bank, which will remove the Boot2 image from a TI-Nspire upgrade file. This means that you can effectively prevent your calculator from having downgrade prevention. (It should be noted that there may be incompatibilities between your current Boot2 and future TI-Nspire OSes, preventing this trick from working forever.)

Update (Travis): TI now seems to have removed the download link for version 3.0.1 of the non-CX Nspire model from their website.

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Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
DavidG Account Info
(Web Page)

Nice job making a news article about this.

Some calculator users without much experience may have their calcs bricked.

Reply to this comment    22 April 2011, 19:18 GMT

Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
flyguy Account Info

Might be worth mentioning that the older model Ti-Nspire CAS is available for $65 on Amazon right now.

Reply to this comment    22 April 2011, 21:53 GMT


Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
KermMartian  Account Info
(Web Page)

Even the non-CAS version with 84+ keypad is $40-$60 on eBay. Goes to show you no one wants an Nspire. :P

Reply to this comment    23 April 2011, 02:20 GMT

Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
flyguy Account Info

What's the deal w/ Ti and Homebrew? Here you have a devices that millions of students will buy and use, guaranteed. It looks like Apple w/ the iPhone, circa 2007 (except the initial version of NSpire had an obscenely bad keyboard layout -- the product manager on that one needs to explain that). And yet while Apple opened an app store and released an SDK in 2008, what do we have from TI? Three years later, dedicated nerds are still trying to get homebrew up to par with that of calculators that are 10+ years old (TI-89)? Where is the vision here? I can already run every HP graphing calculator on my iPhone. With Ti-Emu already released, I can't imagine it would be that difficult to port for jailbroken iPhones. The iPhone already has CAS calculators in the app store (Spacetime). With the NSpire approaching $165 for the unreleased color version, it may well be cheaper for education developers to program iPod touches and encourage educators to use those. What's a TI executive going to say then? "We had a death grip on the market, but, uh, we completely failed to support a bunch of smart people who really wanted to give us free value." They're still riding the same basic Ti-82 design from 1993. It'll be an antique in just a few years... Instead of taking a 30% cut of NSpire app sales, they're getting a 0% cut of nothing. Confuses me. The market is a huge wasted opportunity. When I was taking AP chemistry, I would've paid at least $10 for YAPT on the Ti-89. I don't hate the NSpire software. The keyboard layout is definitely not very good. HP had the same problem (changing things they should leave alone) when they updated the 48 series w/ the 49g+ (corrected in the 50g). But the fact that I can't install event hooks (autocomplete?), RPN, YAPT, Ti-Chess, etc. really discourages me from using the calculator on a daily basis or recommending it over the 89. Are there any official words from TI on this?

Reply to this comment    25 April 2011, 07:06 GMT

Re: Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
KermMartian  Account Info
(Web Page)

At the risk of advertising, let me point you to this article about the situation:

http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?id=443

Reply to this comment    25 April 2011, 16:14 GMT

Re: Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
Kevin Ouellet Account Info
(Web Page)

Yesterday, I tried typing calculations on my TI-Nspire clickpad for the first time ever, and indeed the keypad is terrible x.x

I already tried to code on it before and had the same issues, although not as much since I was typing text for the most part, but that is a reason why I rarely use my calculator at all compared to my Prizm or my TI-84+.

Reply to this comment    26 April 2011, 05:38 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
fryedsoft  Account Info
(Web Page)

Ti has a long history of screwing with homebrew apps, especially ASM apps.

They only started supporting ASM on their calcs when they couldn't stop fargo and zshell devs from getting the most out of their 85 and 92 calcs, and then the SDK was crippled with a stupid code signing scheme that limited code size.

As for their current offerings, I swear that Ti anymore builds their calcs based on high school teacher input instead of Math professors and scientist input. Teachers want pretty graphics and ease of use while professors and scientists want raw power and calculation expandability. Teachers don't want programming capabilities because in their mind it turns them into a gameboy (Completely ignoring the fact that programming takes math to make a game work right not to mention gets students interested in computer programming) while professors want programming to solve complex problems without having to enter 20 equations manually each time. I think this is the same reason the Ti-82 OS keeps living on and on and the Ti-85 OS is dead, even though the Ti-85 OS was much more superior in many aspects and ran on basically the same hardware as an 82 with a slightly bigger screen. The Ti-92 is the last calc OS they made with Both Teachers and Professors in mind. Thankfully they haven't snuffed it like they did the Ti-85/6 yet but who knows, they'll probably replace it with the Ti-84 super saiyan edition anytime now with bright flashing yellow case, 16 MB of flash and the same limitations and 24K Ram Footprint the Ti-82 has had for almost 20 years now.

Reply to this comment    20 May 2011, 04:14 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
JBB Account Info

I wonder how the google nspire teachers feel about their loyality to ti, now that ti has made all their gray screen nspires obsolete and relatively worthless by announcing the color screen cx models? In addition ti has taken down OS 3.0 for non-cx nspires from their site which doesn't help the values of gray screen nspires either. Then there is the question of what sort of problems the cx models will have in addition to that terrible nspire keyboard and what and when ti will do something about those problems like will ti ship cx's with the desolve bug in them?

This whole fiasco has been in the making for about four years now and there are probably other problems to surface that we don't even know about so all things considered you couldn't sell me an nspire of any variety for $20 right now.

Reply to this comment    1 May 2011, 03:07 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
JBB Account Info

Speaking of other problems to surface, ti is now admitting to integration and limit issues with 3.0.

Reply to this comment    1 May 2011, 18:03 GMT

Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
chris houston  Account Info
(Web Page)

Wow... That was sort of unexpected... Hope you all who want Nspire os 3 already downloaded it... Maybe something like the Nspire os archive by Peter Ossmasky will appear... What happened to that anyway?

Reply to this comment    2 May 2011, 10:44 GMT

Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
JBB Account Info

Actually you should not want os 3.0 because it has the possibility to brick (make unuauable and not fixable) your calculator. Isn't if just eff'en wonderful how ti screws up everything it produces???

Reply to this comment    2 May 2011, 21:36 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
karl128k Account Info
(Web Page)

Actually, there is a secret link that ti has where the downloads are still available (I found out about it from TI Cares)

It has the versions for non CAS and the CAS. Get them before they get taken down.

Oh, and you can avoid the bricking and downgrade prevention problems if you use TNOC!

Reply to this comment    10 May 2011, 22:05 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
karl128k Account Info

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/3c3rdxw

Reply to this comment    10 May 2011, 22:07 GMT


Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
chris houston  Account Info
(Web Page)

I am not certain if this is new.. Install 7-zip and right-click on the ti nspire os file and open it as an archive. I looked at one os I had on hand, don't know what version it is exactly, but it shows the contents of it as boot2.cer boot2.img Ti-Nspire.img Ti-Nspire.cer and samples.zip. I always wondered what was in the os file... PS: above link goes to 7-zip website

Reply to this comment    11 May 2011, 02:18 GMT

Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
chris houston  Account Info
(Web Page)

They released a new OS.. 3.0.2 and I have installed it upon my Nspire with no problems.

Reply to this comment    21 May 2011, 23:00 GMT


Re: Re: Beware Installing TI-Nspire OS v.3
calc84maniac  Account Info
(Web Page)

Congratulations. Though, now you cannot downgrade *at all*. Not even if you used TNOC.

Reply to this comment    27 May 2011, 13:55 GMT

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