Re: A85: Re: A86: Asm Questions that have been building up :)

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Re: A85: Re: A86: Asm Questions that have been building up :)


At 04:17 1998-03-25 -0800, you wrote:
>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).

Hehe :) Most people probably believed it was a joke (until they saw
some demonstration).

>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?

Yes, I would. For instance, how did you map out the opcodes manually!?
I mean, how do you check what the opcode did? David Boozer might
have known the calc used a Z80 (that was probably not a secret) which
should make his hacking a lot "easier" than what you did.

>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).

Hehe... it could be possible that someone without any connection
to the internet has hacked the 85 in a similiar way, and still doesn't
know about it. Not very likely though.

>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.

Just to see how the calc worked? I think that sort of stuff is quite
interesting myself :-)

--
Real name: Jimmy Mårdell                 
IRC......: Yarin                         
Email....: mailto:yarin@acc.umu.se      <-- NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS!!!!
Homepage.: http://www.algonet.se/~mja/
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