Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain "roms" Liévin
Posted by Xavier on 16 February 2025, 18:12 GMT

Today, we're carrying the sad news of the passing of Romain "roms" Liévin. It was relayed by François "mmu_man" Revol.

In this TI graphing calculators community, Romain was especially an instrumental part of the Linux Programmers Group, which brought the community pieces of libre, portable software (usually working on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows) for communicating with and emulating the TI graphing calculators we've come to love: libticonv, libtifiles(2), libticables(2), libticalcs(2), and their better-known TILP (II), TIEmu and TilEm front-ends respectively. The ability to communicate with (almost) the entire lineup of TI graphing calculators through a single, unified API, in its second iteration, is unmatched.

In 2007, he visited TI EdTech in Dallas, picking up a variety of calculators and cables to aid in further development of the communication libraries. TI doesn't want to invest in porting their software to Linux and the BSDs, and does usually no longer provide documentation, but helps select persons with hardware donations. Even to this day, few members of the user community had such a level of interaction with persons on TI's payroll.

Professionally, Romain was teaching some aspects of computer science and physics, and had additionally undertaken a PhD.

I met him several times over the years, and picked up his set of calculators and cables in 2010, in order to carry forward the maintenance and evolution of the LPG stack, mostly working on the libraries. A nice and smart person, with a good long-term vision for the community. It showed in decisions such as requiring that some features remain optional in TIEmu; this enabled TIEmu to remain usable into the 2020s with minimal maintenance, so despite the slight additional complexity it brought, time has now shown that it was the right way forward.

mmu_man will keep the memories from him at the engineering school, where we were young and technology was cool and interesting. That's when he remembers him smiling.

Article written by Lionel Debroux with a tribute of François "mmu_man" Revol.

Newprog 2.0 and NPPTOC released - TI-68k
Posted by Xavier on 30 April 2021, 20:46 GMT

Newprog 1.0 by is a very powerful programming language released in 2010 for the TI-68k series. Its syntax is close to TI-68k Basic, but its functionality is closer to C and ASM: access to memory, sprites, timers, OS variables, etc. In addition, executing TI-Basic instructions directly is possible. Newprog programs can be edited and compiled directly on the calculator. Basically, it is similar feature-wise to Axe Parser for the monochrome TI-Z80 series, released in the same time frame; sadly, unlike Axe Parser, it seems to have come too late to trigger a significant revival of the corresponding community.

Recently, Newprog 2.0 was released on ticalc.org. It represents an evolution of version 1.0, with generally good backwards compatibility, and significant new functionality. The main upside of Newprog 2.0 is that it can be used in conjunction with NPPTOC, a new calculator-side program performing source-to-source translation between Newprog and C under some conditions, e.g. that all variables have a single type throughout their lifetime. Once translated, the programs can be compiled to assembly using GTC (calculator-side and computer-side) or GCC4TI (computer-side), creating faster, standalone native code binaries.

However, there's more! Thanks to NPPTOC, Newprog 2.0 adds support for libraries, which can be programmed either in Newprog or C(+ASM), then compiled into native code, and called from Newprog programs. This unleashes the full power of native code. Other improvements in Newprog 2.0 include a rewrite of the documentation, to fix errors and improve clarity, as well as new functions.
All in all, this looks to be a very solid new release... existing and new users of Newprog alike should love it!

Article written by Mael Bansard (author of Newprog) and Lionel Debroux.

More text-based adventures for the TI-eZ80 series
Posted by Xavier on 25 December 2020, 20:48 GMT

With access to native code programs restored almost four months ago, it's high time I resumed featuring programs for the TI-eZ80 series: TI-83 Premium CE / 84 Plus CE and Python variants thereof :)

Let's start with another couple of "text adventures" - text output and formatted text commands input - uploaded in 2019. The popularity of the genre has faded, but well-designed adventures are usually hours of fun, sometimes temporarily frustrating when there's a roadblock, for those who attempt to discover the adventures entirely by themselves, without using walkthroughs. Taking external notes and map drawings is advised in some games, especially to help re-playing them.

Open Adventure CE is a port Colossal Cave Adventure 2.5 by "DrDnar". The programming of the original Colossal Cave Adventure game started in 1975 (!); since then, a significant number of persons have contributed to various versions of it. As in many adventure games, the player is navigating a complex maze containing treasures and monsters, solving puzzles, while of course trying to avoid dying prematurely.

A first upload in our archives for its author, ZEMU by Nicholas Mosier brings Z-Machine emulation to the TI-eZ80 series. The Z-Machine is a lightweight 16-bit virtual machine running Z-Code, created in the late 1970s for executing text adventures on a huge variety of platforms, originally used by Infocom; over time, successive versions of the spec and machine have gained capabilities, and spawned several improved derivatives allowing e.g. native support for 32-bit integers, the making of larger files, or the addition of images and sound data, for more complex and realistic games. The availability of a Z-Machine means that among other games, you can play Zork on your TI-eZ80 calculator, and therefore be eaten by a grue plenty of times before you beat the game... don't worry, that's natural, that's the hallmark of Zork ;)

We wish you a merry Christmas, and a hopefully as good as possible end of the very peculiar year 2020, hoping that 2021 will be a better one...

Article written by Lionel Debroux.

CE jailbreak allows ASM programs to work again!
Posted by Xavier on 6 September 2020, 20:58 GMT

We're happy to relay a very interesting, yet unsurprising, piece of news: the ability for the TI-83 Premium CE, TI-84 Plus CE(-T) and Python editions thereof, to run ASM programs, officially removed by TI a few weeks/months ago depending on the model, as reported in the previous news item, has been unofficially added back thanks to a jailbreak, called "arTIfiCE". From what we can see in the install tutorial, arTIfiCE seems to exploit a bug in the "Cabri Jr" geometry app in order to launch a shell.

This move was so obvious and predictable that it was really a matter of when, not if. After all, the TI-eZ80 series was not designed with security in mind, and in fact no TI graphing calculator model released to date is (even though TI seems to have learned a few tricks in the newer, high-end TI-Nspire CX II series, its security roadblocks appear to have been defeated relatively early on)

What are the next steps? Logically, just like on the TI-Nspire series, TI would release new software versions fixing the vulnerabilities used in the current iteration of the jailbreak, then more vulnerabilities will be exploited to restore access to native code again. Rinse and repeat, for a while, it's the usual cat & mouse "game".
Thinking out loud, we might see a series of 0-days showcasing exam mode insecurity being released over the several few days/weeks before the major exams of the northern hemisphere - something the TI enthusiasts community always refrained from doing. Such a timeframe would make it possible for some users to use programs interfering with exam mode (and needless to say, face the significant consequences if they get caught! - just to be clear, we are not condoning cheating). And this, most importantly, before the fixes for the vulnerabilities get a chance to be made and widely distributed, as well as standardized testing regulation amended to forbid usage of the older, vulnerable versions and to mandate thorough checks of the current state of calculators right before the exam is taken.
If that situation were to happen, it would probably be better to give up on the current exam mode "security model" entirely and rather reflash the OS with an exam-tailored version right in the exam room - something that should have been done from the get go, notwithstanding the practical hurdles, if the fantasized exam security were actually taken seriously. Unfortunately, a path of lower resistance for the educational system would be to just forbid the usage of the affected calculator models, several days before the exams, creating more injustice and further reducing the real-world value of said exams!

Time will tell, but there's a chance that there will be a spectacular - and publicized - backfire for the very smart demands from standardized testing regulation authorities, who didn't get (or didn't understand) the memo that predictably, removing access to native code does not make exams safer - quite the contrary.
Top-level TI management should be somewhat aware of that, in fact some of us in the community, myself included, attempted to explain all that to them several years ago... but we know that regulators have the power to forbid pieces of equipment for whatever reason, and manufacturers need to bend to their demands, no matter how unfounded, ill-motivated and counterproductive...

Thankfully, I'm not in the shoes of the previously mentioned teacher whose video about a long-fixed issue in TI's OS allowing exam mode restrictions bypass on the TI-eZ80 series might well have contributed to the removal of official native code access on those calculators, then consequently the current jailbreak, and might therefore contribute to potential future attacks on the exam mode.
Triggering a worldwide restriction on users' rights to use the hardware they bought, and potentially forbidding hundreds of thousands of calculators and creating further stress for students taking exams, is not something I'd be proud of.

arTIfiCE's author doesn't seem to have uploaded it to our files archives yet(?), so for now, CE users stuck with a recent OS version can learn more on its official website. Go forth and use that great piece of work, which raises the usefulness of the Cabri app :)

Article written by Lionel Debroux.