Re: TI-H: what should i buy?

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Re: TI-H: what should i buy?



On Thu, 29 Jan 1998 16:19:43 EST KrazyJolt@aol.com writes:
>
>I've saved up enough money to buy myself one calculator.   I have an 
>82.  I
>want something I can make cool stuff for.  Of course the logical 
>choice is the
>85 because everybody uses it and everybody makes drivers for it.  I 
>also saw
>the 86 which is generally a souped up 85.  Do 85 drivers and shells 
>work on
>the 86?  Are any drivers for good projects coming out for any other
>calculators  (82, 92)?  Should I just wait and get a 92?  I also need
>something that I will need for school in the future.
>
>
Howdy,

I recomend the 86.  I had an 85 last year and really liked it over what I
saw of the 82 and 83.  Its menuing interface is a lot better and
easier/faster to use than that of the 82/83.  It also has a lot of
features that the 82/3 don't: solver, binary/hex/octal support.  This
summer I heard about the 86 and was impressed so I bought on for Calc
this year.  It definitely lives up to the hype about being a better 85. 
Anyone who has ever used the 85 will almost immediatly be able to use the
86.  The 92s might have some funky math functions but schools are
starting to ban them.

The 86 has a huge memory, 92k RAM when empty.  It also has direct
assembler (machine really) support similar, but more powerful, to the 83.
 With that much memory, I have never been able to fill it with all the
games I like to carry around.  At the end of the summer when I got it
development for the 86s was a little thin but it has since picked up and
a lot of things have been written this fall.

The 86 is able to do ZShell emulation through the Aurora Shell (ASE).  It
is dodgy but useful enough to run all the games that I have tried.  The
86 is much more crash proof than the other calcs as well.  If it hangs,
pull on of the batteries, hit the [ON] button, put the battery back in
and (usually) the calc comes back up with all its memory (the down side
is that this makes a security/password program 'impossible').  I don't
know about driver support personally because I never really got into
building things but from what I've seen the 86 is a little behind (about
even with the 83).  From what I've seen, if you want to have drivers
immediatly get either an 85 or a 92 because that's what most of the
hackers here develop for first.

The only down side I've seen of the 86 is that its BASIC interpreter is
VERY slow because of all the paging the calc has to do to go through all
that RAM/ROM space.  Also, they are about $20 more than the 85.  I got
mine from Wal-Mart for $119.99.

Matthew


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