Did anybody forget Animation Studio 86 (Levi Lansing), capable of 4 to 32 greys. Converting stick figure movies to 4 greys can last 2-3 minutes easily with the 64k file size max (all calcs have that limit). With the PIC2 xpander "upgrade" I converted a full 8 min Ren & Stimpy shorty for fun. Had to mod the oncalc player to load / delete/ play all the files in correct succession. Each file was 40k, so that one could be playing while the previous deleted and the next loaded. The 86 has 96k user RAM, making that easy. The files will not be released here because the PIC2 expander isn't very common and is impractical to build. Also, there the new animation designer for the 8x series by Benjamin Ryves.

I'd seen Animation Studio 86 before, and even tried some short animations with it, but it didn't seem worth it since you need to draw a picture for each frame, and can easily fill the mem that way (not that I blame the author, I don't know of a better way to do it).

Actually, you can import from a MPEG with Animation Studio 86. Levi Lansing used vertical compression for all frames in the compiling process. The video player simply decompiled the animations to the correct quality :) Too bad he left the community early 2002, one of the 86 Greats

Wow, that's impressive. I'll have to try it now...

> 64k file size max (all calcs have that limit)

No they don't. Ourworld, a world map application for the 83+ (and probably others) is over 90k.

obviously it has been done, but unless TI decides to make a calc with at least 100 mb ram memory(which i have no idea how big the calc would have to be, since i don't know that much about the size limitations), color screen, and speekers, no movies worth watching will be made.

Maybe TI will decide to make that dream $300 dollar calculator...I would buy one, but i already have a gameboy advance (lol)

That would still be cool even to just have a color screen, esspecially to program on it. Too bad a color screen has no educational purpose, therefor, TI won't make it. :(

Colored calcs...i'd call it "TI-100 Color"
Good name isn't it?

I don't see why TI does not put more memory because computer memory is not that big. As for a color screen, I would like to have a voyage 200 with a color screen and a wifi card. I would definitely buy that.

Maybe if you knew what you were doing, (not YOU specically) you could take out the old lcd, put in a colored one, then develop a comiler for the color screen, and make an entirely new OS...

Too much work. I thought it might work because people have made lcd's that light up, and even speakers, but nobody has ever independtly made an entire OS that doesn't run off the TI-OS.

Also, I don't know where you can get color screens that size, and It would be hard to put in.

Basically, I'll leave all that to the geniuses at TI.

(not YOU *specifically*)

develop a *compiler*

Im not very good at typing, sorry

People have made OSs that don't run off the TIOS - PedroM.

WiFi card? *stuffs hand in mouth to keep from laughing* Um, you have to remember that it *is* made mostly for graphing. If you want a handheld device that can use wireless networks, buy a PDA, or build a WiFi adapter yourself that plugs into the link port.

A WiFi card could be used so that teachers can syncronize what they have on their calcs with yours... and you could cheat on tests, play awesome games, and chat using programs similar to AIM... WiFi cards...add that to the 100 mb ram, color screen, and built in speakers.

Yeah, you would have yourself a 10-25Mhz PDA. It seems pretty pointless to have a WiFi card. Maybe an IR link, but I don't see why TI would put the money in reasearch and in the calculators to add in an IR link that math teachers will prohibit. A color screen seems resonable since it can be used differentiate different lines on a graph and possibly for lists and matricies. A piezo speaker seems useless for math, except for notifying the user of completed equations and graphs (ex. 3D graphing on the 89). I can't see the current memory as an issue. Every calculator has enough memory to do anything that math throws at the calculator, except for solving Pi. I can see a card slot for storing oddly large programs like surveying equations or graphic program that require a lot of memory to work.

I think more Flash ROM is needed rather than more RAM. ~10 MB would do the trick...(and believe me, people would still find ways to fill it up...)

I could understand putting in more memory (even 2 MB would probably be enough)...

Well, the 84+ SE has 1.5 MB archive anyway, so 2 MB would not be a significant improvement, in my opinion...unless you mean 2 MB RAM, which wouldn't be a bad idea (especially if there was some sort of automatic RAM backup feature like the RAM Recovery in Omnicalc).

I'm only a novice Asm programmer, but I'm pretty sure that having color and a WiFi card would make Assembly programming harder. (Not C, but true 68k Asm.)

color screens have a small educational purpose, they can make graphs easier to read

I guess you have a point, but graphs aren't that hard to read in monocrome. GBD's would be big, too, because if you had any Y= functions, the GBD's would have to store the color of each one.

And that would take at most 10 bytes....

yea...

it might make 3D graphs readable and if you have lot's of crossing lines it gets hard