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Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
- marethyu 4y agoWondering if all these emulators are open sourced
- tomashubelbauer 4y agoMy understanding is this is all done using MAME all of which is open source. Is this incorrect?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 4y agoIt looks like MAME is emulating the hardware but where do the ROMs come from?
- db48x 4y agoCopied right out of the original rom chips; where else?
- guerrilla 4y agoThey could have rewritten them themselves or just emulated them is where else. If they are just imaged from the original ROM chips, then is it legal to host them here and if so why? Is it not piracy or do they have permission or even cooperation, e.g. from TI? Or has their copyright (not sure if that's the right concept here) expired?
- db48x 4y agoLol, of course there’s no cooperation from the copyright holders; that would cost real money and generate no revenue. And the copyright, as usual for works created in the US, lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. These things won’t be out of copyright for at least a century, so piracy is the only option. If the copyright holders complain, IA will make the complained–about items dark. That means nobody can see them, though without actually losing any of the files or metadata. If anyone remembers the dark calculators a century from now, someone at IA will be able to reverse the decision and make them available to the public again.
- guerrilla 4y ago> that would cost real money and generate no revenue. This isn't necessarily true. In fact, it could be the opposite. It may be very good PR for them and could cost as little as some board meetings and some lawyers' time.
- db48x 4y agoTens of thousands in cost for $0 revenue. You can’t measure good will, and probably only a few hundred people would even notice. HP’s advertising department doesn’t get out of bed unless they’re doing a television commercial to be seen by a million people or more. That means printers, not 40 year old calculators.
- guerrilla 4y agoI don't know why you have your head stuck in a rock. Corporations spend trillions on good PR and they have a plethora of ways to measure how they profit from it. "Good will" is branding and advertising.
- db48x 4y agoYet somehow they never ever help emulators. Nintendo actively hunts down sources of roms and destroys them, year after year. For every game they’ve ever made, even for games you’ve never heard of (all except that one single game that they licensed to someone else 40 years ago). EA kills off a few games every year, and those are usually just a few years old and still have players. A company called Atlus sued its own fans when they created a server emulator for an MMO that Atlus was shutting down (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS6oBjK8AwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS6oBjK8AwQ>). Software companies just do not care about the good will of their own customers.
- schneems 4y agoSame question. I would like to see the code. The 89 is quite a feat of engineering and can do stuff like simplifying algebraic equations on the fly. I always wanted something like a cross between the 89 and a spreadsheet where I could see my math represented as an algebraic formula to double check that everything was wired up. I’ve always wondered how all of it worked inside the 89
- Gigachad 4y agoIA seems to host a whole lot of copyrighted content.
- gigagigachad 4y agoNice username!
- theragra 4y agoIf i remember correctly, they lean on either agreements with rights holders or the fair use doctrine. Sometimes going as far as to the court.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoLibrary!
- textfiles 4y agoYes.
- mmcgaha 4y agoIs it just me or is the 49g not working?
- jb1991 4y agoeven all these years later, despite that I have all these computing devices around me, I still feel like a kid in the candy store when I look at this. I was growing up in Mexico and very very occasionally I would see a kid with one of these old-school graphing calculators and just be super jealous. I did not get a chance to actually use one until I was an adult
- ilyt 4y agoI eventually just bought a modern clone from https://www.swissmicros.com/products https://www.swissmicros.com/products It even works with original printer. That for some reason still had replacement printer heads available in ~2018 and I managed to fix it.
- krab 4y agoWhat does it mean that it's an "Access-restricted-item"? For example TI-81 https://archive.org/details/ti81-calculator https://archive.org/details/ti81-calculator
- guerrilla 4y agoWorks for me.
- winterqt 4y agoI presume that it's stream-only, as in it can't be downloaded with a button. (Now, if that means that you can't grab whatever it's downloading by inspecting the requests, that's a different story.)
- textfiles 4y agoModifications done to make it run in the browser make it historically / archivally problemstic, so it's restricting downloads. There is nothing related to these calculators not available in other locations on or offf the archive.
- NKosmatos 4y agoMy beloved TI-85 is there and brings back so many memories. It served me well all those years at the university and then some. It’s screen is somewhat broken, so it’s good that we have an easy way to emulate it.
- travbrack 4y agoI had one too. I guess I did math on it, but I remember much more clearly downloading games to it via the graph link cable. I spent hours playing Tetris in math class.
- NKosmatos 4y agoYes, the exchange of games and other programs was something that gave fame to this series of calculators. I also remember we had a fake program emulating the reset so we could avoid having our TIs wiped by the exam supervisor. Not proud of it, but I had a few formulas/macros on many exams :-)
- LeoPanthera 4y agoSee also: "Calculator forensics" https://www.rskey.org/~mwsebastian/miscprj/forensics.htm https://www.rskey.org/~mwsebastian/miscprj/forensics.htm A fast way of identifying calculators that have identical internal math, and a crude way of judging their quality.
- eole666 4y agoFor those looking for a more usable emulator for every day life, some have been available for years. Having a ti 86 emulated on my phone was great when I was a student (and way cheaper than a real one..). http://fms.komkon.org/ATI85/ http://fms.komkon.org/ATI85/
- db48x 4y agoI use an HP48 emulator on my phone for day–to–day mathematical tasks.
- notpushkin 4y agoWhen I was a child, I've had a Elektronika MK-61. [0] Not a graphing calculator, but it could be programmed. My father wrote some simple game for it (I think it was Bulls and Cows). I wanted to port Heroes of Might and Magic, not realizing that it's way too ambitious :-) Here's an online emulator you can play around with: http://mk-61.moy.su/emulator.html http://mk-61.moy.su/emulator.html [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61
- jhallenworld 4y agoI bought one recently on eBay from a seller in Ukraine (despite the war, shipping is still up- from Kiev at least). I also bought its brother, an MK-52. These calculators are interesting: Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds. Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts. Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not allowed, you have to enter 0.5. The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5 gives 2e-1 MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and EEPROM via some extra functions. Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world) electronics fabrication system. Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with the calculator. To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys: https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika-MK-61/CmdRef.html https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika...
- chx 4y agoWhere do I report a bug? There's no such thing as a HP48GP. It seems that's a HP48G+ That calculator, even thirty years later is close to my heart. As far as I can remember, it was my first Internet purchase lightly used -- I was still in Hungary and I bought it from the USA -- and then we stacked four SRAM ICs on top of each other with most legs simple melted together vertically except for the select ones. Hand soldering SMT parts, yay -- a buddy did it, I am not crafty enough for that. In essence it became a much more expensive 48GX without the expansion slot. Dave Arnett himself was participating in these conversations, back then, which blew my mind. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/CS0lTpKkBHw/m/vnJh61RXJpoJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/CS0lTpKkBHw/m/vn...
- db48x 4y agoI remember thinking about upgrading my HP48G when I was in high school. In the end I saved up and bought the HP48GX plus a calculus expansion card instead. That came in handy for the Calculus and Physics classes I had that year. The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and used it to dial out to the county public library system, which offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack. Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that I was just checking my email. Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours either in my Physics teacher’s classroom playing spades (he taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the modem wasn’t actually necessary. Incidentally, I changed the title on https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to “HP48G+”, as you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I’ll let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named “hp48gp”, so it’s fine.
- Thorentis 4y agoThis was the first I'd heard of the IA hosting emulations, and the first time heating of MAME. Incredible! Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense. What's the point in archiving all this vintage software if you can't run it? Archiving emulations of eg consoles and having open spruce software to run the emulations is the perfect solution. Wonderful work by IA as usual.
- implements 4y agohttps://archive.org/details/hp48gx-calculator https://archive.org/details/hp48gx-calculator - is also available as a free iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/ihp48/id1549608953 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/ihp48/id1549608953 - the latter seemingly well regarded by the HP calculator enthusiasts at: https://forum.swissmicros.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2836 https://forum.swissmicros.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2836
- tombert 4y agoI use iHP48 as my default calculator app on my iPhone, and I do really like it, but it's a little irritating too, the main problem being that you have to be very slow and deliberate when typing out numbers. If you type numbers too fast it will likely drop a few. This isn't a problem most of the time, but I find it's an issue when I need to have multiple of the same digit (e.g. multiplying by 1000).
- whartung 4y agoI use this too. It had its fiddly moments, but it’s pros far outweigh its cons. It’s not my default calculator, I still use the stock one for that. But it’s my next stop when things get busier. The singular best benefit this has over an actual HP, for me, is a backlight. I find the original mostly too hard to read today. On the phone, it’s nice and bright and more than functional and useful.
- hajile 4y agoI’d guess that most people would be better served by a HP42 emulator for day to day calculations.
- joezydeco 4y agoFree42 for iOS is wonderful. I use it all the time and leave my real one at home, safe in a drawer.
- pjmlp 4y agoNo CASIOs :\
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoMAME also emulates at least one CASIO calculator (CFX-9850G).
- chongli 4y agoAhhh too bad. My current favourite calculator is a $10 CASIO fx-260 Solar II. It’s really compact, it doesn’t use VPAM, it’s really simple to use (no menus to navigate or anything like that).
- mikewarot 4y agoI really like the $10 white Casio solar I got at CVS. It does a really good job with degrees/minutes/seconds which came in handy when doing gear setups.
- chongli 4y agoGear setups? That's really interesting! Do you mean gear ratios for transmissions and the like? I've been using the degrees/minutes/seconds for astronomy calculations! It's funny because I bought the calculator after watching Dave do a review of it on the EEVBlog [1] youtube channel. He actually wishes they'd get rid of the DMS key in favour of some other keys he prefers for doing electronics calculations (polar <-> rectangular conversions). I bought it anyway thinking I'd have no use for DMS but here I am using it! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF3xKFOJ804 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF3xKFOJ804
- mikewarot 4y agoSetups to the hobbing machines to make gears. I used to be a machinist before Long Covid pulled me out of the work force. Before that I was an IT guy, programmer, electronics technician, etc.
- whoisthisguy 4y agoTI-89 basically saved my ass in collage. Not only that, I was the fourth "best student" in collage based on grade average. I modded the firmware so I was able to upload text docs organised in folders. Text filed had TOC, that made navigation easier. I was also able to search within those files. If you became fluent using all features of TI-89 (integration, derivation, diff. eqs., shortcut keys etc.) and you had a solid abstract understanding of the subject (which of course required some studying), TI-89 basically got the rest of the job done in minutes. TI-89 was magic.
- varrock 4y agoCan you further expand on uploading text docs? I'm not sure I understand why that helped you. Also, what did you get your degree in?
- codetrotter 4y agoI’m wondering too. I remember when I was in HS, one of my teachers said that they could easily spot if anyone was cheating with their calculators because almost all of the students that were not cheating would be focused on reading and writing by hand most of the time, and only occasionally reach for their calculator to calculate something with it. If someone was paying an abnormal amount of attention to their calculator, it could indicate that they had for example put notes on the calculator, or had some extra programs that had features outside of the allowed ones. So then the teacher might sneak up behind the student and have a glance at what they were doing on the calculator. Also, to try and combat those kinds of things my school always had us show them the list of programs on our TI-84 Plus calculators before a test started, and we had to delete anything outside of what was allowed. That being said I think the calculator can be modded with custom things that could be hidden. So probably the best way of preventing people from cheating was by paying attention to who was using the calculator too much.
- realo 4y agoThe best way to prevent cheating is to forbid all calculators during the exam ...
- Narishma 4y agoIs there a reason they only have graphing calculators?
- textfiles 4y agoI only added the calculators that have the artwork setting. Otherwise you look at a single line or LCD. The blog post discusses this.
- pcmoore 4y agoWhat's a good simple calculator for programmers? Easy entry/conversion of hex and binary but simple arithmetic with possible shifts. I don't need to do trigonometry.
- jimmaswell 4y agoI use WolframAlpha for everything
- pcmoore 4y agoI'm looking for a physical calculator
- jameshart 4y agoWhy? Calculators are a relic of when we used to require separate single function devices to accomplish anything, like VCRs, Cameras, GPS receivers, music samplers, or transistor radios. There is nothing a physical calculator can do that an IPython session can’t. And a physical calculator can’t copy paste the result where you want it (except modern phone camera OCR has I guess got to the point where you could probably grab the result off a calculator screen). Outside of cases where you need dedicated pieces of hardware to accomplish a task, like motors or heating elements or something, there’s very little reason for preferring a dedicated device these days over a software or app equivalent. And even then, a version of the hardware that hooks up to a general purpose device to use its input and screen is likely the most useful form factor. Modern ‘single function devices’ are most likely actually just low power multifunction computers running most of the functionality in software anyway.
- PeterisP 4y agoDedicated physical buttons are far superior to 'universal' touchscreen interfaces, if the thing you need fits on them. And having a separate dedicated device helps having a workflow that doesn't invite distraction or context switching on a universal device, so having a dedicated device often is a reasonable intentional choice even if the same functionality is already available on another non-dedicated device.
- throw0101c 4y agoNext up: slide rules (?).
- anthk 4y agoI think there are free as in freedom ROMs for TI and HP calculators out there.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThat is damn cool.
- chacha21 4y agoDesktop calculators are the best. Shame on computers ! https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-14 https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-14
- bane 4y agoDespite being a terrible price/per unit technology, I loved my TI calculators, but I was always sort of out of sync with everybody else trying to chase more symbolic math power. Everybody using a TI-82? I'll get a TI-85. School system migrates to the TI-85? I'll get a TI-86! University wanted a TI-89, I'll get the Amiga in a box TI-92+. The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model, so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off of ticalc.org. The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities. I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator apps that come with the phones.
- tombert 4y agoI had a similar pattern though for slightly different reasons. My parents got me TI-83 for my calculus class in high school, which is what everyone had and I was in sync. I managed to drop my calculator down a sewer grating somehow, and I was too embarrassed to ask my parents to buy me a new one, and I couldn't afford another TI graphing calculator, so I ended up getting a substantially cheaper Casio FX-9750G at a thrift store, which actually turned out to be a reasonably good calculator for the price, and got me through Calculus I without too much trouble. In calculus II I wanted the symbolic stuff, so I managed to find a used HP 50g, and I immediately fell in love with it (and RPN in particular), and ended up using it for everything. I got spreadsheet software installed on there, I played with 3d graphing, I got a clone of Zelda working, it was super awesome. It was almost more like a PDA than a calculator to me. Similarly, I run an the iHP48 emulator on my phone as my default calculator now.
- kstrauser 4y agoLet’s hear more about that “Amiga in a box” bit.
- 4y ago
- philistine 4y agoI taught myself programming on a TI-81 by making a blackjack game. I'm not a programmer by trade, but a hobbyist. Still, turning on that 81 and inputting a GOTO brought back memories.
- tombert 4y agoThat was sort of my intro to programming as well, though decidedly less cool than a game. I got really tired of typing out my physics equations by hand, and I was also bad at memorizing them for physics class, so I decided to cheat and write a program for the calculator that basically "plugged in" a lot of the equations for me. It ended up being debateably useful, but honestly the act of writing the programs ended up actually being a reasonably good way for me to learn the equations anyway, so I kept it up throughout high school as a form of studying.
- progman32 4y agoI loved writing programs like that during tests, really saved time for common operations. I was also very prone to mechanical errors so this saved me from that too. It was often easier in a multiple choice question to just have the calculator brute force the answers while I worked on the next problem. Totally permitted usage.
- jszymborski 4y agoAnyone else remember playing a port of the arcade game Phoenix on their TI-84 plus? Almost everyone at my HS got it through a sneakernet of seniors.
- dharmab 4y agoHeck, I had an entire Final Fantasy fangame on mine. And an OS with file browser and GUI.
- wcfields 4y agoI'm here for the games, possible to have a fully loaded one with ti-calc.org conenction?
- westurner 4y agoMAME: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME "TI-83 Plus Calculator Emulation" https://archive.org/details/ti83p-calculator https://archive.org/details/ti83p-calculator TI-83 series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-83_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-83_series : > Symbolic manipulation (differentiation, algebra) is not built into the TI-83 Plus. It can be programmed using a language called TI-BASIC, which is similar to the BASIC computer language. Programming may also be done in TI Assembly, made up of Z80 assembly and a collection of TI provided system calls. Assembly programs run much faster, but are more difficult to write. Thus, the writing of Assembly programs is often done on a computer. I had a TI-83 Plus in middle school, and then bought a TI-83 Plus Silver edition for high school. The TI-83 Plus was the best calculator allowed for use by the program back then. FWIU these days it's the TI-84 Plus, which has USB but no CAS Computer Algebra System. The JupyterLite build of JupyterLab - and https://NumPy.org/ https://NumPy.org/ - include the SymPy CAS Computer Algebra System and a number of other libraries; and there's an `assert` statement in Python; but you'd need to build your own JupyterLab WASM bundle to host as static HTML if you want to include something controversial like pytest-hypothesis. https://jupyterlite.rtfd.io/ https://jupyterlite.rtfd.io/ Better than a TI-83 Plus emulator? Install MambaForge in a container to get the `conda` and `mamba` package managers (and LLVM-optimized CPython on Win, Mac, Lin) and then `mamba install -y jupyterlab tabulate pandas matplotlib sympy`; or login to e.g. Google Colab, Cocalc, or https://Kaggle.com/learn https://Kaggle.com/learn ( https://GitHub.com/Kaggle/docker-python https://GitHub.com/Kaggle/docker-python ) . To install packages every time a notebook runs: !python -m pip install # or %pip install <pkgs> !conda install -y !mamba install -y But NumPy.org, JupyterLite, and Colab, and Kaggle Learn all already have a version of SymPy installed (per their reproducible software version dependency files; requirements.txt, environment.yml (Jupyter REES; repo2docker)) Like MAME, which is the emulator for the TI-83 Plus and other calculators hosted by this new Internet Archive project, Emscripten-forge builds WASM (WebAssembly) that runs in an application-sandboxed browser tab as the same user as other browser tab subprocesses.
- westurner 4y agoTI-83 apps: ACT Math Section app; /? TI-83 ACT app: https://www.google.com/search?q=ti83+act+app https://www.google.com/search?q=ti83+act+app Commodity markets with volatility on your monochrome LCD calculato with no WiFi. SimCity BuildIt has an online commodity marketplace and sims as part of the simulation game. "Category:TI-83&4 series Zilog Z80 games" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:TI-83%264_series_Zilog_Z80_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:TI-83%264_series_Zilo... Computer Algebra System > Use in education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system#Use_in_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system#Use_in... : > CAS-equipped calculators are not permitted on the ACT, the PLAN, and in some classrooms[15] though it may be permitted on all of College Board's calculator-permitted tests, including the SAT, some SAT Subject Tests and the AP Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and Statistics exams.
- roryokane 4y agoIf you have an Android phone, you can get much higher-quality emulation of Texas Instruments calculators by installing Graph 89 (https://bitbucket.org/dhashoandroid/graph89-paid/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/dhashoandroid/graph89-paid/src/master/ ; free on the Play Store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89Emu&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...) and ripping or downloading a ROM for your calculator model. There is also a more recently updated fork of Graph 89 that I haven’t tried: https://github.com/milaq/graph89 https://github.com/milaq/graph89. Compared to these new Internet Archive emulations such as https://archive.org/details/ti89-calculator https://archive.org/details/ti89-calculator, Graph 89 has these advantages: • less likely to drop quick inputs in succession • higher-resolution images of the calculator faces (example: https://github.com/milaq/graph89/blob/94c8c0d20044f478f6696628203bc98e2e96f804/app/src/main/assets/portrait/ti89tclassic/skin.jpg https://github.com/milaq/graph89/blob/94c8c0d20044f478f66966...) • highlights the button on the calculator’s face when you click it • allows loading programs into memory from separate files of the type you can download from https://ticalc.org/ https://ticalc.org/ • works offline, because it uses your offline copy of the calculator’s ROM
- genjii931 4y agoNo HP11C, no joy. :(