3 ms·

Even as someone who believes in the indefensible bloat of modern software, I'd say TI-OS on my 84+ (from using it in high school and college several years ago)

Even as someone who believes in the indefensible bloat of modern software, I'd say TI-OS on my 84+ (from using it in high school and college several years ago) is not exactly the fastest to use: - Graphing a plot was slow due to slow CPU and high-precision math libraries (could take 3-10 seconds depending on function complexity and detail) - MathPrint mode slows down printing expressions to an extent, IIRC even moving the cursor through history felt sluggish. - The B&W LCD screen with slow color transitions adds more latency than a compositor does. - Garbage collecting the flash memory could take dozens (IIRC) of seconds, and would happen unannounced when manipulating saved programs (IIRC not in regular calculations).

stonogo 4y ago
I beat Doom on a TI-84. I'm not sure I buy this.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Doom does very little work to draw each frame. It does a handful of small calculations to update the game state, and then traverses a BSP tree and draws some vertical blocks for walls followed by a flood fill for the floor and ceiling (although I suspect that was missing on the TI-84 ports because filling is slow). Calculating and drawing a complex graph often requires far more operations.
  - Lio 4y ago
    That's what's wonderful about Doom. The simplicity of what it does belies the effort put into achieving that on limited hardware. When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product. I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering. If the stake holder cares more about a tick list of features than how well the features work there's not much the engineer can do. In my experience stake holders are often much more interested in their burn down graphs and Gantt charts than in getting a really polished core which could later scale quickly with just config. You need a product owner with real vision and understanding of what good looks like. It's almost a cliche now to reference Steve Jobs but he really did get that a few really excellent features are better than a laundry list of stuff that sucks.
    - john_the_writer 4y ago
      Yep.. and oddly the stake holder who want more features are the customer. I want a radio, a cd player and AC. I don't even use the Bluetooth, because I don't talk on the phone when I drive. The features on these new cars do IMHO too much.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        I adapted the very old FM/AM, cassette, and external CD changer in my very old Range Rover to have Bluetooth because it doesn't have an aux input and my phone doesn't have a headphone jack anyway, and I want to listen to music or audiobooks off it when I'm driving. I looked into reversing the protocol between the CD jukebox and the stereo, and using an Arduino to inject the appropriate commands - maybe even get the "next" and "back" track buttons working too - but in the end I just fitted a cheapy bare-PCB bluetooth deelie into the cassette deck and wiring it to permanently think it has a tape in. It works pretty well, and it looks pretty standard. My phone sticks to the flat 1990s dashboard (remember when cars didn't have to have swoopy curves everywhere?) with a couple of bits of double-sided sticky Velcro, and plugs into a USB-C socket fitted where the lighter socket used to be. Good old farm truck technology.
        nyanpasu64 4y ago
        I'm personally a fan of mushroom hooks (3M Dual Lock) besides the high price, because it's less spiky than Velcro and has more lateral rigidity (though unfortunately you need 3 pieces on each side in a triangle for a robust stable mount free of tilting wobbling). Though I actually wouldn't recommend it for mounting a phone; I added a piece to my phone case, but took it off because it kept catching onto my hand and surfaces, and ended up with more entangled dust than soft Velcro.
        Gordonjcp 4y ago
        I actually stuck the velcro to a cheapy Otterbox rubber sleeve knockoff rather than the phone, which has some weird sticky-thing-repelling coating that the Velcro wouldn't stick to.
- George83728 4y ago
  > Doom on a TI-84 Not really though. You played a different game using a much simpler sort of engine (probably a raycaster, similar to wolf3d) with much simpler level geometry (probably square on a grid, and probably without stairs, windows through walls, elevating platforms, etc) There are several games like that on the z80 line of TI calculators, for instance Gemini: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.htm... But the real Doom isn't a simple raycaster, it uses an engine that exists in the space between a raycaster and a true 3d game like Quake. A so-called "2.5D engine". The level geometry had height data, but couldn't overlap itself (so no navigable bridges unless you fake it using raising and lowering platforms (or teleport the player to another part of the level, like the Build engine did.) Rooms could have arbitrary polygonal shapes, walls weren't all at right angles to each other, which complicated the process of rendering and necessitated the use of BSP trees to traverse the level geometry efficiently. I know of one instance of such a game engine being created for the 83/84 z80 lines of calculator, detailed in a series of blog posts here: http://www.benryves.com/journal/3720656 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3720656 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3724115 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3724115 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3725786 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3725786 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3728004 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3728004 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3729994 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3729994 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3735869 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3735869 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3739423 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3739423 AFAIK these gifs represents the pinnacle of a Doom-like engine on the z80 line of calculators: http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Moving-Sector-Triggers.gif http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Movin... http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.07/Walkthrough.gif http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.07/Walkt...
amluto 4y ago
The main latencies in TI-OS (from memory) boil down to actual computation (graphing, solving equations, etc), the really slow LED, and those occasional slowdowns (GC). Of course computation was slow on the slow, under-featured CPU, but that was to be expected. My car’s touchscreen system doesn’t do anything that is computationally complex — a computer from the late 90s could run a media player and do work at the same time, and my car’s CPU is faster. The LCD is what it is. I’m talking about latency too when the pixels start trying to change. Anything with a CRT avoided this problem. And GC is a fair criticism. But my car’s touchscreen is always slow. Oh, and it also often. takes a minute or two to start working when I get on the car.

stonogo 4y ago

I beat Doom on a TI-84. I'm not sure I buy this.

onion2k 4y ago
Doom does very little work to draw each frame. It does a handful of small calculations to update the game state, and then traverses a BSP tree and draws some vertical blocks for walls followed by a flood fill for the floor and ceiling (although I suspect that was missing on the TI-84 ports because filling is slow). Calculating and drawing a complex graph often requires far more operations.
- Lio 4y ago
  That's what's wonderful about Doom. The simplicity of what it does belies the effort put into achieving that on limited hardware. When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product. I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering. If the stake holder cares more about a tick list of features than how well the features work there's not much the engineer can do. In my experience stake holders are often much more interested in their burn down graphs and Gantt charts than in getting a really polished core which could later scale quickly with just config. You need a product owner with real vision and understanding of what good looks like. It's almost a cliche now to reference Steve Jobs but he really did get that a few really excellent features are better than a laundry list of stuff that sucks.
  - john_the_writer 4y ago
    Yep.. and oddly the stake holder who want more features are the customer. I want a radio, a cd player and AC. I don't even use the Bluetooth, because I don't talk on the phone when I drive. The features on these new cars do IMHO too much.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      I adapted the very old FM/AM, cassette, and external CD changer in my very old Range Rover to have Bluetooth because it doesn't have an aux input and my phone doesn't have a headphone jack anyway, and I want to listen to music or audiobooks off it when I'm driving. I looked into reversing the protocol between the CD jukebox and the stereo, and using an Arduino to inject the appropriate commands - maybe even get the "next" and "back" track buttons working too - but in the end I just fitted a cheapy bare-PCB bluetooth deelie into the cassette deck and wiring it to permanently think it has a tape in. It works pretty well, and it looks pretty standard. My phone sticks to the flat 1990s dashboard (remember when cars didn't have to have swoopy curves everywhere?) with a couple of bits of double-sided sticky Velcro, and plugs into a USB-C socket fitted where the lighter socket used to be. Good old farm truck technology.
      - nyanpasu64 4y ago
        I'm personally a fan of mushroom hooks (3M Dual Lock) besides the high price, because it's less spiky than Velcro and has more lateral rigidity (though unfortunately you need 3 pieces on each side in a triangle for a robust stable mount free of tilting wobbling). Though I actually wouldn't recommend it for mounting a phone; I added a piece to my phone case, but took it off because it kept catching onto my hand and surfaces, and ended up with more entangled dust than soft Velcro.
        Gordonjcp 4y ago
        I actually stuck the velcro to a cheapy Otterbox rubber sleeve knockoff rather than the phone, which has some weird sticky-thing-repelling coating that the Velcro wouldn't stick to.
George83728 4y ago
> Doom on a TI-84 Not really though. You played a different game using a much simpler sort of engine (probably a raycaster, similar to wolf3d) with much simpler level geometry (probably square on a grid, and probably without stairs, windows through walls, elevating platforms, etc) There are several games like that on the z80 line of TI calculators, for instance Gemini: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.htm... But the real Doom isn't a simple raycaster, it uses an engine that exists in the space between a raycaster and a true 3d game like Quake. A so-called "2.5D engine". The level geometry had height data, but couldn't overlap itself (so no navigable bridges unless you fake it using raising and lowering platforms (or teleport the player to another part of the level, like the Build engine did.) Rooms could have arbitrary polygonal shapes, walls weren't all at right angles to each other, which complicated the process of rendering and necessitated the use of BSP trees to traverse the level geometry efficiently. I know of one instance of such a game engine being created for the 83/84 z80 lines of calculator, detailed in a series of blog posts here: http://www.benryves.com/journal/3720656 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3720656 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3724115 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3724115 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3725786 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3725786 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3728004 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3728004 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3729994 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3729994 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3735869 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3735869 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3739423 http://www.benryves.com/journal/3739423 AFAIK these gifs represents the pinnacle of a Doom-like engine on the z80 line of calculators: http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Moving-Sector-Triggers.gif http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Movin... http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.07/Walkthrough.gif http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.07/Walkt...

amluto 4y ago

The main latencies in TI-OS (from memory) boil down to actual computation (graphing, solving equations, etc), the really slow LED, and those occasional slowdowns (GC). Of course computation was slow on the slow, under-featured CPU, but that was to be expected. My car’s touchscreen system doesn’t do anything that is computationally complex — a computer from the late 90s could run a media player and do work at the same time, and my car’s CPU is faster. The LCD is what it is. I’m talking about latency too when the pixels start trying to change. Anything with a CRT avoided this problem. And GC is a fair criticism. But my car’s touchscreen is always slow. Oh, and it also often. takes a minute or two to start working when I get on the car.