Last reset May 30, 2001
This site is dedicated to several aspects of Texas Instruments (TI) calculators. Namely, emulation and developement. While I'm not a very experience developerd (yet) for this platform, I do like to learn, and I know other people are the same way.
My interest in TI-Calcs has a distributed origin. I used to play around with my old 82 and my more recent 85 a bit during high school. I'd even made a few programs in ti-basic. What got me interested recently is that I'm looking at a job doing embedded development, which is a field I'm interested in, but I have no experience. It's hard to get experience in this field, but I decided that demonstrating my ability to learn might be a good way to make up for it. So, I set off to learn assembly for the Z80 (this is the processor that the TI-82,83,83+,85,and 86 use). My first task was to find an emulation platform. This part was easy, after little searching I found out that ticalc.org offers a lot of stuff. I picked up an emulator called Virtual TI. Simple enough. But as TI will gladly tell you, the only way to make this emulator actually do anything is by dumping the ROM from your calculator with the TI-Graph Link onto your computer. This posed a problem for me, because I don't actually own a TI calculator. Several friends do, however, so I called around looking for one that I could borrow. I tried finding an 86, but the idea was that any from the 80 series would suffice. I had no luck and was getting impatient, so I searched the web for rom dumps. After several hours of this, I was about to give up and found this site. It's all in spanish, but they have a lot of different roms from different platforms. Needless to say I was ecstatic, and downloaded all of the TI ones. Now I have a fully functional emulator.
The next thing I had to do was get the development platform. Since I was aiming to learn assembly, this meant a Z80 assembler. I got really lucky in finding Assembly Studio 86. Not only is it a Z80 assembler, but it also included the libraries for the 86 ROM, extremely decent help files, and an IDE resemblant of Microsoft Visual Studio (I think this was intentional). It's packed with nifty features, and is a really good assembler.
Now, I had a platform on which to develop programs, and one on which to run them. Naturally, the next step was to actually learn assembly. This turned out to be harder than I'd hoped. I won't go into great detail here, but I will say this: the Z80 processor was originally release in July, 1976, and hasn't really changed much. So, it's got a very limited instruction set. Well, I already have some past experience with assembly for the Intel 386 architecture, which is slightly helpful, but more daunting than anything. I'll shut up and say now that I found many sites that offer help on this type of development.
To conclude the introduction, I'd like to point out that this site isn't actually going to offer a whole lot of specific information about development, but instead be more of a hub to help direct you to good sources.
This site is aiming to help people who want to learn how to develop assembly programs for Texas Instruments calculators that use the Z80 processor (They are the TI-82,83,83+,85,86). Currently there will not be any actual information regarding development, but there are going to be links to information. Anybody who knows, or wants to learn Z80 assembly using a TI calculator may stand to benefit from this site.
Please make note that I cannot take credit/responsibility for any information you find on any pages not on my site, nor what you do with this information. All material provided is for educational purposes only, and any misuse of the material may be in violation of applicable laws.
By making use of this site, you must agree to use the provided material only in ways concordant with all applicable laws in your area. Remember, ignorance is no excuse -- If you break one or more laws and are charged with crimes in a court of law, you will be held responsible for your actions, regardless of whether or not you thought you were breaking any laws. If you aren't sure about the legality of material on this or any other site, then stay away from it.
In a perfect world, all knowledge would be in free exchange. But we live in a world with copyrights. As such, you must choose to live in concordance with the copyrights on material, or be aware that you may be held responsible for ignoring them.
If you've made it this far, then you probably match one of the following descriptions:
1. A programmer looking for reference material or utilities
2. A student or employee who uses a TI calculator and has the need or desire to write your own programs
3. A creative person who has a good idea for a program, but doesn't know how to write it yet
...And as such, you've read all the above content and are looking for actual information. Well, here it is, broken up into several sections.
I wish you the best of luck on your adventures with the Z80, if you ever write anything really cool and want somebody to show it off to, let me know ;)
Please feel free to send me any questions/comments/links/etc you may have. I'll try to respond to everyone's email A.S.A.P., but occasionally I get really busy.
email: ticalc_z80@yahoo.com
Hit Counter:
Last reset May 30, 2001