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   Home :: Archives :: News :: Long Live TilEm 2.0!

Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Posted by Ryan on 10 July 2012, 02:48 GMT

As we continue clearing off the news desk, we bring you some extremely big news in the realm of emulation. Once upon a time, we were all thrilled about the release of TilEm, a rather powerful and successful calc emulator that aided users and programmers alike. Recently, the calculator deities have handed down from on high TilEm 2.0, a release so ridiculously packed with features that it is maddening. A quick glimpse at the user manual reveals the amount of work, with the utmost attention to detail and usability, applied towards this project. It seems as though customizability has been a major improvement in TilEM 2.0 with regards to appearance, screenshots, and interface features. Jump to after the break for the official release announcement and run, don't walk, to download and start using TilEm 2.0 today!


TilEm is dead, long live TilEm2

Benjamin Moody (floppus maximus) and myself Thibault Duponchelle (contra-sh) are proud to announce the first release of TilEm2. You probably already know TilEm "old" because it was a good emulator serving the community since 2000 (written by Julien Solignac then improved and maintained by Moody Benjamin). For those who don't know, TilEm is an emulator that reproduces behavior of z80-based Texas Instrument calculators (TI73 through TI86 including the TI81 :p). As with other emulators, TilEm2 needs an official ROM, of course.

TilEm old was available for GNU/Linux natively then ported to Windows and Mac. TilEm2 is already available for GNU/Linux and Windows (TilEm2 is likely to work on Mac OS X, but we have not tested it). 3 years ago, I joined the team and we started to work on a new version of TilEm. Even if it seems to be a sequel, all the code was written from scratch, including a new emulation core written by Benjamin. This new version is released for beta testing.

It features highly detailed hardware emulation.

TilEm 2's hardware emulation is greatly improved - it's now at least on par with, and in some cases better than, any other emulator released to date. All of the z80 models are supported (including both hardware revisions of the TI-81 and both revisions of the TI-82); the only part of the hardware that is not currently emulated is the TI-84 Plus USB controller.

Sending/receiving programs, variables, and applications:

TilEm2 uses libticalcs and provides visual feedback by printing progress and allowing cancel. You can send single or grouped vars, flashapp, or whatever you want. A nice receive window allow you to save programs from your calc to you computer. There's also the possiblity to send and receive to and from the TI-81.

Grayscale emulation:

TilEm has had grayscale support for many years (originally an FIR filter supporting only 4 levels; later changed to an IIR filter supporting 64 levels, but with a tendency to flicker.) TilEm 2, however, uses a completely new grayscale algorithm based on a modified FIR filter, which should work a lot better.

Saving screenshots:

You can record animations (gif) or simply grab a static screenshot (png, bmp, gif output and more...). There's a lot of setting as size (at least 3 default size per model plus custom size), foreground/background color, animation speed. And of course a preview window to see before saving what you have done.

A full featured debugger for assembly programming:

With memory view (could be edited), disassembly view, registers (could be edited), stack, breakpoints, step by step, and more...

Macros:

It allows recording key presses and automatic execution (at startup or when you load the macro file).

New pack of skin and new skin format (TiEmu skin file):

You can now do a skin for TilEm2 in 15 min and you can do some funny stuff (see the documentation about skins).

This version has a new and improved user interface, as well as many improvements to the hardware emulation. See the project website at http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tilem/ for more information.

This release is only a step, development goes on. We will add some new features to TilEm2 soon. In addition to the features you will request and bug we will have to fix.

Please report bugs and feature request (on the Sourceforge forum:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilem/forums/forum/84646

Have fun with TilEm2 !!!

The current maintainers of TilEm are *Thibault Duponchelle* and *Benjamin Moody* (but many other people have played a part in making this program possible, especially Hugues Luc Bruant "fullmetalcoder" who started a QT GUI and helped us a little for other stuff, and Scott Zeid who provided the pictures from which we based the icons).

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The comments below are written by ticalc.org visitors. Their views are not necessarily those of ticalc.org, and ticalc.org takes no responsibility for their content.


Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
elfprince13 Account Info
(Web Page)

Fantastic work everyone! It's been a LONG time since I used TilEm, but it was, for a very long time, my favorite emulator. I'll be sure to give it a spin sometime soon.

Reply to this comment    10 July 2012, 05:10 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Stefan Bauwens  Account Info
(Web Page)

Interesting. :)
I'm using wabbitemu at the moment, but I should try this once.

Reply to this comment    10 July 2012, 17:01 GMT


Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
return_0 Account Info

I use WabbitEmu also. When I was searching for emulators, it seemed to be the only one supporting Mac OS X. But according to TilEm's website, it will probably work on OS X too.

Reply to this comment    10 July 2012, 17:11 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Thibault Duponchelle  Account Info
(Web Page)

Thanks ryan for the news !

As you said, TilEm 2 is really designed for YOU users.
The development of this new version was started 3 years ago, and we put our skills to serve the community.

Even if TilEm 2 is primarly designed for GNU/Linux, there's also a Windows all-in-one installer (see the url in my message header).
It should work on mac but we need someone to test it.

TilEm will continue to be in active development.
Please report bugs and request feature.

Have fun with TilEm 2 ;)

Reply to this comment    11 July 2012, 12:36 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Kaaiman  Account Info

Now the calculator descriptions (/Basics/Calculators) should be updated, since TilEm now supports TI-81 emulation! :)

Reply to this comment    12 July 2012, 15:13 GMT

Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
blue_bear_94 Account Info
(Web Page)

Speaking of the page, it's missing WabbitEmu as well.

Reply to this comment    12 July 2012, 15:54 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
KermMartian  Account Info
(Web Page)

It's also missing jsTIfied, for what it's worth. ;)

Reply to this comment    12 July 2012, 21:00 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Kaaiman  Account Info

It's sad that some sections on ticalc.org haven't been updated for ages.

Reply to this comment    19 July 2012, 10:00 GMT

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Travis Evans  Account Info

I actually went through and updated much of the static content a while back. Obviously, though, I now have some more work to do. :-)

Reply to this comment    20 July 2012, 04:59 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
return_0 Account Info

Yeah. Some of the calculator listings don't even include the TI-84 series, which is 8 years old…

Reply to this comment    24 July 2012, 00:51 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Travis Evans  Account Info

Can you point me to any particular pages that are missing calculators? I'd like to take a look at anything I might have missed.

The other day I added several missing categories to the accounts directory search page, and removed the Other Sites section (we decided this was best because it was so far out of date and none of us feels like/has time to maintain it). I'm aware that Upcoming Programs is still missing stuff, but we've been considering discontinuing that and Program Ideas and instead renovating the mailing lists for that and other purposes.

Other ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Reply to this comment    25 July 2012, 15:24 GMT


Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Travis Evans  Account Info

At last, the emulator software page and the basics/calcs pages have been updated with jsTIfied and Wabbitemu and the recent TiLem release! Let me know if I screwed up something (we seriously need some automatic generation script for all this table stuff…).

Reply to this comment    5 August 2012, 22:12 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Kevin Kofler Account Info
(Web Page)

And the most important feature: TilEm is now completely Free Software! The old non-commercial-only emulation core has been replaced by a rewritten, Free one.

Reply to this comment    13 July 2012, 11:35 GMT


Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Thibault Duponchelle  Account Info

Completely true.

Thanks to Benjamin Moody for his great job on rewriting the emulation core !

Reply to this comment    13 July 2012, 11:44 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Kevin Kofler Account Info
(Web Page)

I need this patch:
http://ur1.ca/9tnm3 (tilem-2.0-lm.patch)
to be able to build TilEm 2.0 on Fedora. Otherwise, I get this error from ld:
/usr/bin/ld: ../emu/libtilemcore.a(graycolor.o): undefined reference to symbol 'pow@@GLIBC_2.2.5'
/usr/bin/ld: note: 'pow@@GLIBC_2.2.5' is defined in DSO /lib64/libm.so.6 so try adding it to the linker command line
Fedora's ld is configured to not allow transitive linking (at link time, runtime behavior is not changed), all libraries you use symbols from must be linked in explicitly. (This matches the behavior of other linkers such as gold.) See:
http://ur1.ca/9tnma (Change In Implicit DSO Linking)
http://ur1.ca/9tnmb (Understanding DSO Link Change)
(I don't like this "feature" personally, but it is how things are set up.)

In addition, you are trying to sprintf a size_t with a %d format, which is not correct on 64-bit platforms, you have to use %ld or the C99 %zd:
http://ur1.ca/9tnmh (tilem-2.0-64bit.patch)
On x86_64, this is mostly harmless, but on big-endian 64-bit platforms (e.g. ppc64), it will always print 0. (Note that you may also want to use a %u format rather than a %d, because a size_t is unsigned.)

Your .desktop file also triggers the following non-fatal error from desktop-file-validate:
[snip]/tilem2.desktop: error: (will be fatal in the future): value "Emulator" in key "Categories" in group "Desktop Entry" requires another category to be present among the following categories: System, or Game
Please always run desktop-file-validate on .desktop files you ship and fix its complaints.

Reply to this comment    23 July 2012, 21:09 GMT


Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Thibault Duponchelle  Account Info

Thank you for this report.

The first patch was already applied in rev 660 (to the configure script not the makefile.in) due to another report (anonymous user). But anyway thank you for the patch !

The desktop non fatal error is fixed in rev 668 (thank you).

Other things should be fixed soon.

I see you're trying to package tilem2 for fedora, that's great, if you need any help, do not hesitate to ask us (on the tilem-devel it's probably better or by mail to floppusmaximus and me).

Regards

Reply to this comment    24 July 2012, 13:01 GMT


Re: Re: Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Kevin Kofler Account Info
(Web Page)

I have it up and running in the CalcForge repo for Fedora now.

Reply to this comment    24 July 2012, 23:57 GMT

Re: Long Live TilEm 2.0!
Deep Thought  Account Info
(Web Page)

Wow, it's been a long time since I've tried TilEm, but I just installed TilEm2, and it's really improved! The changes from the previous version really are huge, and fantastic. I just wish it were portable and didn't require an installer, but all in all it's a great emulator now.

Reply to this comment    27 July 2012, 01:51 GMT

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