First official release of CEmu, the TI-84 Plus CE / 83 Premium CE emulator
Posted by Xavier on 24 February 2018, 00:54 GMT
A few days ago, CEmu version 1.0, the portable, free & open-source TI-84 Plus CE and TI-83 Extra Plus Premium CE emulator, was finally released for Windows, macOS and Linux!
It took a bit of time for this first official non-dev release version to be considered sufficiently ready for general usage (development started in late 2015). However, development builds have been available in real time for quite a long time now, and they still are. No need to compile the code yourself even for development builds :)
CEmu is particularly suited to programmers, as it provides lots of features to help CE development, and it's very customizable. Listing the whole set of features here would take way too much space, but let's at least mention the standard screen capture/recording, the built-in ROM dumper, the integrated eZ80 disassembler, the full-featured debugger, and many viewers/editors (memory, ports, stack, VAT, etc.). Oh, and also nifty functionalities like the AutoTester, a framework to have automated tests on programs (which the community CE C toolchain uses), and special memory areas that CEmu optionally intercepts in order to provide a way for programs to communicate back to the emulator (to print a string to the console, for instance). Some of these features were part of old wish lists for other community emulators, but CEmu made them a reality!
In the future, the plan is to have the following major evolutions, although not necessarily in this order: source-level debugging, a code profiler, USB emulation, Lua scripting integration, etc. Some of those are already in development now, actually. You probably won't miss them, as an update checking feature is also included in the software.
CEmu is probably the most advanced calculator emulator so far, and as already said, it's open-source, like most programs of that kind, especially in this day and age. You can visit the project on GitHub if you want to take a look at the source code (C for the core, C++/Qt for the GUI), give some feedback, report a bug, or even contribute yourself!
Let's take this opportunity to congratulate the authors, contributors, and testers for their greatly appreciated work.
(Nope, the feature requests a few of you sent a few weeks ago haven't been forgotten, no worries :D)
