A85: Re: A86: Asm Questions that have been building up :)
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A85: Re: A86: Asm Questions that have been building up :)
At 01:21 AM 3/25/98 +0100, Jimmy Mårdell wrote:
>At 10:18 1998-03-24 -0500, Dan Eble wrote:
>>Also, don't forget David Boozer, who discovered how to hack the 85 custom
>>menu to execute machine code. Without him, Blackjack would still be the
>>pinnacle of TI calculator game programming. :-)
>
>I still think someone should write the a story about TI-assembly
>programming, from the early days when you were stuck with TI-Basic,
>and lo! assembly was "discovered" :-) At least I would think that
>could be a good story :-)
I *would* be terribly curious to see what people were saying on the Calc-TI
list around the time the original discovery was made (the list did exist
back then, didn't it? Unfortunately, Deja News doesn't go back that far).
It would also be quite interesting to hear the story from David Boozer's
perspective. Does anyone know if David Boozer released anything about
hacking the 85 before September 1, 1994 (the date in his text file)? Were
other people trying to hack it besides him? Did he foreshadow it in any
way, or did he just come out of the blue to release his text file?
On the other hand, I could tell my story. I hacked the TI-85 myself, before
I was on the Internet, before I knew there was an online "TI community" (in
fact I knew only one other person who had a TI-85), and before I knew there
was any such thing as ZShell. I did tell this story briefly in my "TI tips,
tricks, and bugs" document, but there's plenty of room for elaboration.
Would anybody be interested to hear this story in detail?
I'd imagine that, if David Boozer hadn't hacked the 85 and publicized the
info on how to do it, somebody else would have. Take me, for example. If
nobody else had hacked the 85 by the time I got on the Internet and
realized that there was an online TI community, I'd have released my info.
In fact, I wonder if there actually are other people who independently
discovered the 85's hidden ASM capability, later to find out that it had
already been done. AFAIK, I'm the only one, but I'd be curious to know if
there are others who just kept quiet (or told a small circle of people
about it, who didn't circulate it elsewhere).
While the discovery of the hidden asm capability of the TI-85 was a big
step, it was not the only step. Thanks must also go to Dan Eble for having
the idea to create a *shell* for running machine code programs. I didn't
have this idea back when I hacked the 85; I never even took advantage of
what I'd found to write games or anything. Back then I was only interested
in reverse engineering it and getting a ROM dump.
I've crossposted this to both A85 and A92 because:
- it pertains to the TI-85
- people who use Fargo might be curious about what I've done
on other TI graphing calculators.
---
David Ellsworth
davidell@earthling.net
IRC: eXocomp
ICQ: 2300673
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