Texas Instruments vs. Casio

pacHa · Post by **pacHa** » Tue 17 May, 2005 5:22 pm

TI84SE wrote:Yea I personally haven't used Casio or HP before, but I prefer TI.

Well, that's objetcive...

CrimsonCasio · Post by **CrimsonCasio** » Wed 18 May, 2005 7:52 pm

Dang, cant believe i missed out on this for so long

To clear up some things:

1) untill the arival of the Algebra FX2.0 (AFX) Casio's sucked (compleatly), no ASM, no good games, just a few desperate basic programmers (if you are someone that thinks Ti BASIC is inferior you would kill yourself before programming in Casio BASIC)

2) Untill about 1-2 years ago Casio compleatly ignored (and sometimes threatend) the casio community, we developed the AFX with zero knowlege about how it worked and under the pall of various threats of warrenty violation. over time we managed to get working C games on the AFX using its flash memory, at first we were limited to 6 games per calc but we managed to hack the transfer protocals ad built several new ways to send C games to the calc, now we can have as many as we can fit in memory (does not effect RAM at all)

3) Casio suddenly stoped selling the AFX series of calcs for no apparent reason... it may have been because they realized we had made one of there calcs the perfect cheating tool for the SAT/ACT's (the FX1.0 has no CAS but the AFX does, yet the FX1.0 turned out to be the AFX with the CAS icon removed from the menu, we figured out how to turn it on, thus making the FX1.0 the only calculator with a CAS allowed on the ACT's or other standardized tests)... however it was also probably because they were about to release the new Classpad 300.

4) The classpad came out with lots of anticipation in the community, powerfull calc, 4mb of flash mem, etc... we were drooling

. However, almost as soon as it came out I discovered two major bugs (bear with me hear, im trying not to sound big headed but i had a lot to do with this), I called casio tech support to see if i could report the bugs, took them 2 weeks to finally tell me they didnt know what the classpad was (showed it to them on there site and they never called me back...). So... being a bit pissed off I located a site called classpad.org that seemed to be run by casio, e-mailed the person in charge of it a long angry letter, and had the blind luck that the guy designing the site was one of the programmers that developed the classpad... he wrote me back, fixed the bugs, and put me in contact with some people at casio (up till that day we had never gotten anything back from casio except vague threats)

5) through my contact with Casio we eventually set up a sort of unofficial partnership with Casio through casiocalc.org, now the programmer i contacted and a few casio rep's post and read the forums looking for bug reports and suggestions... one of the results of this was the Classpad SDK, a fully supported *free* SDK for the creation of Add-ins on the Classpad (cpsdk.com), thus sparing us the effort of reverse engeneering our classpads as we had done with our AFX's... in return casiocalc supports no illegal or "unethical" uses for the classpad and casio calcs in general, though we still teach you how to mod you FX 1.0 (though we dont advise you use it in a way that could get you in trouble)

6) So, having come this far, we still have further to go, the Classpad has some key failings that are driving us nuts at the moment, though hopefully those will be fixed soon, and very few add-ins have been released for the classpad since the SDK is quite complex and has a definte learning curve even if you already know C++.

in essence, you Ti guys have it easy

, but our hard work is finally paying off, the classpad is a truely impressive calc, and with time i think it will become the best out there (i dont claim it currently is... think Nentendo DS, lots of potential but we cant be sure it will be used wisely).

At the moment I would vote for Ti having the best calcs, but only because they made it easier for you guys to work with them early on, currently the AFX is probably the best gaming calc out there (programmable in C, ASM, and Pascal) but we havent had the time you all have to make those games, and we still dont know how to do everything we would like to... anyway, we'll have to see, one thing i think Casio has on Ti is memory, the AFX has something like 128k ram and 1mb flash (i may be wrong on that, was off the top of my head) the the classpad has 4x that... its nice not to have to worry about memory

(oh, we also have been able to do 64 color greyscale

)

anyway, Casio History 101 is now over, class dismissed

thecheat · Post by **thecheat** » Wed 18 May, 2005 8:09 pm

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Wed 18 May, 2005 8:10 pm

Btw you said casio BASIC suck compared to TI-BASIC, but the classpad is a very powerful calc and I tried Final Fantasy XI on it (a french RPG) and it ran very fast, even though the walking character was ASCII and it was very cool, I dont even think it would be possible on a 83+SE

CrimsonCasio · Post by **CrimsonCasio** » Wed 18 May, 2005 9:19 pm

ah, well, your right about that, CP BASIC is in a diffrent catagory, it actually resembles C++ more than Casio BASIC... shortly after the classpad came out i wrote a big FAQ about how to make CP BASIC able to use "objects" and "pointers" with some freaky string manipluations... also when i figgured out how to make the "call()" function it seriously improved the capabilites of the language (call() allows for execution of a program who's name is in a string, and is basically exploiting a strange bug in CP BASIC that involves making a local variable copy of the program then running the copy... theres no other way to do it and technically you shouldnt be able to even do that)

still, its slow as heck, and ASCII graphics are about the best we can do thanks to a bug in the Matrix and List ops that causes anything over 5x5 dim to take 5 minutes to process (as in Mat A[1,1] if A is 25x25 takes 5 minutes to return whats in the cell), kevin, you played the version of FF that for the CP emulator, which does not emulate the CP's speed, you would see a huge diffrence on the actuall calc.

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Wed 18 May, 2005 9:24 pm

CrimsonCasio · Post by **CrimsonCasio** » Wed 18 May, 2005 9:52 pm

lol, i write an essay and you respond with "oh"

*sigh*

gimpynerd · Post by **gimpynerd** » Wed 18 May, 2005 9:58 pm

hey crimson isnt the ti-89 allowed on standardized tests? i know it is allowed on AP ones...it has an extensive CAS...and would have much better grayscale if it werent for the hardware change afte HW1 i believe...

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Wed 18 May, 2005 9:59 pm

CrimsonCasio wrote:lol, i write an essay and you respond with "oh"

*sigh*

zebarnabe · Post by **zebarnabe** » Wed 18 May, 2005 10:36 pm

I think TI calculators are better... i myself have a TI-83 plus and a TI-89 HW2, i tried an HP with color screen... well... i think TI SO's are quite more friendly, and as a programmer... well... programming on a TI is enjoyable... in a HP is a nightmare...

CrimsonCasio · Post by **CrimsonCasio** » Thu 19 May, 2005 6:20 am

@gimpy, i do not know about the AP tests, i do know the ACT will not allow the 89 though, it also does not allow the AFX, but the FX1.0 (litterally identical to the AFX) is allowed because it "doesnt have a CAS"

.

Casio's were a nightmare to program, now they arnt

, the AFX turned out to be running DOS of all things, which made it a lot easyer to work with once we figgured that out. and of course the SDK takes care of all your CP300 programming needs

(mmmm ... built in emulator ... mmmm)

you know, if any of you do C++ you can go to cpsdk.com, register (free), and download the SDK (free), then you can play classpad add-in games all you like on your computer, you can even program for it without having the calc.

dysfunction · Post by **dysfunction** » Thu 19 May, 2005 11:50 am

I believe the SATs allow the 89 now because they realized that apps and assembly programs allow the 83+ to do many of the math functions for which they had barred the 89, and as they couldn't really bar the 83, they had to allow the 89.

gimpynerd · Post by **gimpynerd** » Thu 19 May, 2005 11:55 am

why has no one written a CAS for the 83+? maybe i should...

DarkerLine · Post by **DarkerLine** » Thu 19 May, 2005 1:18 pm

It's been one of the things I wanted to do also. At one point, I wrote a symbolic differentiation program for the 83+ in Basic (it was slow as hell though... I didn't program TI Basic two years ago as well as I do now). Now that I know assembly, it should be easier...

gimpynerd · Post by **gimpynerd** » Thu 19 May, 2005 1:25 pm

maybe we should work together...