Re: Turboing
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Re: Turboing
you can't buy mem upgrades officially (Yeah, right, open that cover
and click in some SIMMS.. that would be a sight.). However, some tools
have been made that attach to the linkport, and with the appropriate
(zshell) driver, you can store things in there. most famed in the line
is Mel Tsai's Expander SF. It cost about 60 dollars or so if you let
him make it, and had 1 MB of storage. Though, the chip manufacturor
stopped making the chip. :-(. It's rather hard to do. If you want to
know why, suffice to say you (usually) need to connect the mem chip to
a clock. You can't really do that without opening the cover and
attaching some wires. Seeing as the TI-85 is rather crammed with
parts, that's a bit hard. This particular chip had it's own little
interface. Anyweej, you can't get it anymore. the last have been sold.
Mel Tsai is working on the Expander II, that will be cheaper. It has
it's own little processor in the thing you stick into your link port,
so now any chip can be used. Well, not quite any chip, but a large
collection. I think eeprom or similar cheap stuffs is going in there,
so that writing takes a while (like a harddrive), but reading is as
fast as usual.
however, note that in order for the calc to execute code, it MUST be
in the 32k of the calc's main mem. So you can transfer all your
programs to your expander, and then send em back when you want to run
them.
Turboing your 82/83/85/86 essentially speeds up the crystal emulator.
The ti-8x series is a bit too cheap to warrant a whole crystal (a
crystal sends a pulse out every so many seconds. A 200 Mhz crystal
sends a toggle every 1/200,000,000 seconds. ie: 200 million times a
sec. The TI-8x uses a system of condensators (little things that
temporarily hold electricity) to emulate one. It differs slightly as
your batteries empty out (from about 6.1 Mhz to 5.9), but it works
quite well.
When turboing your calc, you pull one of the condensators, which
drastically speeds up the 'crystal'. The Z80 can handle it, but your
batteries are strained. you are going to have to replace them LOTS.
Also, nearly all asm programs rely on the thing being 6Mhz, with the
results that you can't run much asm games. There are 'slowdown'
programs that run just enough dummy code every timerinterrupt to slow
the thing down back to a 'normal' calc's speed, but it still eats a
lot of batteries. It does speed up graphing and basic programs. If you
want your graphs to zoom across the screen, you might want to consider
doing this. you do need to open the cover and do some complicated
stuff.
For info on both, go to http://www.ticalc.org or
http://www.inlink.com/~dafek/ti-files/ and look around.
References: