Heaven forbid you actually buy a Pocket PC or something similar that already has a color display...

o no.

Or port a CAS to the Gameboy Advance. :)

that would sort of suck because it has so few buttons

They have text editors for it...I am sure people would manage, especially the hacker/geek types who would be likely to use it. I know I certainly would. Now that I think of it, I might just make one if I have enough time & motivation this summer.

I think he is referring to being able to control a calculator with so few buttons...you would have to use the arrows to scroll to the button, then hit the a button to select it...just think how long it would take to hit [2][+][2][enter]...

So was I. There is a text editor for the Gameboy Advance. I have even seen a windowing environment with cooperative multitasking (not task-swapping like the 68K calcs) on it. There is also a BASIC interpreter for the plain GB, which I have used. It is not as bad as people claim, & with some ingenuity, it could be made a lot better (remember that the GBA has 8 buttons), although one could still not hold down multiple virtual keys at once (at least not conveniently), but that is usually only used for reset, so I am not too worried.

It's quite simple really, all you'd have to do for imput is use morse code. One button could be dash, and the other dot, which would increase the number of keystrokes, but decrease the time.

The DS would be a better bet, put a keypad on the touchscreen.

A touchscreen for TI calcs would be marvellous!

Ahem. (see website link)

Well, if TI made a color calc, I would like to see it being the same kind of screen (resolution and color-depth wise) as an iPod Photo. Of course, I don't think color is neccesary and would rather not have the added price. But, color would be handy for graph comparison and such. Also, keep in mind that games would become much bigger if they were in color. Rather than a single bit for each pixel in sprites (or two if you're doing grayscale) you would need to devote an entire character (8 bits) to each for basic 256 colors, which makes graphics data 4-8 times as large. Of course, if TI had a color screen, then you would probably get more memory anyways...

I would like to point out that I thought of a mod that does exactly this; later another member of the community decided to work with me on this. Links and descriptions at http://www.ticalc.org/archives/ files/fileinfo/269/26943.html, and http://cemetech.designerz-core.com/ forum/viewtopic.php?t=17.

The other member's work can be found http://home.nc.rr.com/battousai/KyleCorp /the%20rgb%20screen.htm.

You do realize how impractical that would be, right? Also, if you're going to make plans for it, WHY DON'T YOU ACTUALLY BUILD IT? A *REAL* photograph would make ANYONE more inclined to actually build it.

Err, I understand your skepticism, but I'd like to point out that I have improved it nearly infinitely since then and that that is a file from several years ago. I have built it, and the slow refresh rate of the LCD makes a mess of the color that in theory works fine. Finally, most people think that it's impractical because I'm suggesting 3x96x64 LEDs. I'm not. It's only 6 LEDs (2x each of R,G,B) as backlights that combined make a color image. If the LCD was faster, it would work wonderfully.

ummm..... iPod Photo has a higher resolution than an 89 and 16 thousand colors. An 83+ picture with that depth is 96 MB. The 89Ti has 2.7MB archive... let's see... one picture would fill up about 35.5 889Ti/v200 archives (Xpanded, no apps, etc.). I'll go with what was suggested earlier: three colors.

But the three colors need to be good (i.e. not washed out). The Casio CFX models that a teacher at my school uses have such poor colors that instead of rgb, they are orange (very hard to see on the yellow background), blue-black (very hard to distinguish from black), and green (almost black, too). Granted, these are class calcs, so they can't be in very good condition, but decent colors are a must.

<offtopic>I finally got to play with an 89Ti at Office Depot. They look so much better in real life than in TI's ads and website pics. Also, I was disappinted to find that 84+ notSEs have no faceplate. What is the point of hyping the faceplate if only one model supports them???</offtopic>

I did not realize the iPod photo had 16000 colors, but my point still stands that 256 colors on a high resolution screen would be very nice, and anything else to me is not really going to be worth it. I'd say 3 colors is not really enough for me, i could settle for 8 colors though.

256 colors on an 83+ is: 1.5 MB
8 colors on an 83+ is: 48 KB
3 colors on an 83+ is: 18 KB

and 65536 colors is: 384 MB (this is actually what iPod Photos have: I was wrong)

Where are you getting these large figures? At 384 MB, I'd expect to have a screen with at least 16384 x 12288 pixel display. That's kind of high-res. After Googling it, I found the figures 220 x 176, which with 65536 colours would take up 70400 bytes, much less than 384 MB.

You do realise that 65536 colours requires only 2 bytes (16 bits), right?

256 colours on an 83+ is 6144 bytes.
8 colours on an 83+ is 2304 bytes.
3 colours on an 83+ is at most 1536 bytes (it's not an integral exponent of 2).
2 colours (black and white) on an 83+ is 768 bytes.

No, I did not realize that. Thanks for the correction.

It still stands, however, that an iPod Photo display would be still too large for a calculator (at 96 KB on an 83+). I was off by 4*2^10.

"An 83+ picture with that depth is 96 MB"
lol.