Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators | Hacker News Reader

Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators

github.com

88 points27theo19 comments

One nice thing about Casio is that, unlike TI, they aren't actively cracking down on the modding scene for their calculators. There's no official SDK, either, but the community has successfully made a gcc-based one themselves, and reverse-engineered and documented much of the OS APIs. Consequently, it is possible to write apps for it that have all the same abilities as native ones, and sideloading is trivial - you just mount the calculator as a USB Mass Storage device and copy the binary over. NESizm is probably the most impressive community-made app so far, but other goodness includes a port of Lua, and even a multiplayer 3D game (https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/2319/x2749).

In theory, it is possible to replace the entire OS, and some people have tried rolling their own from scratch, but I don't recall any of those projects getting past the prototype stage. I do wonder if some kind of basic Unix-like is possible given the hardware constraints - 58 MHz CPU and 2 MiB RAM is not much, but there were historical Unix machines with far less. However, if one were to do a port rather than writing it from scratch, what would be the best thing to base it on? Minix?

For the curious, here's the community wiki that documents the platform: https://prizm.cemetech.net/Prizm_Programming_Portal/

I ported the Numworks firmware to the CG50, though it runs from the existing OS

https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19114

I had never heard of these before. Only the Texas Instruments versions that have proliferated since at least the 90’s. Looks like incredible hardware and software compared to what Texas Instruments gets away with selling: https://www.casio.com/us/scientific-calculators/product.FX-C...

Though, I think the fact you can emulate an entire gaming system on it will make it harder for students to adopt it in the classroom. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of how schools look at devices such as this?

The Casio supported pricing scheme for UK schools slashes the Fx-CG50’s price by roughly half, which my sixth form advertised to us as really helpful for visualising anything graphical. Faced with a good deal on something they thought would be useful (and fun!) for students I guess they didn’t dig very hard for caveats.

Our teachers were just as intrigued and excited as we are when they saw games running on the calculator for the first time, and from then on just told students off for getting sidetracked by Super Mario on a case by case basis.

As far as I know, these are popular in Europe, and specifically in France - supposedly that is why it has MicroPython, because that is some kind of French requirement now.

But it is indeed very powerful hardware for a calculator. And the best part about it is that it's still powered by 4 AAA batteries, and lasts for quite a long time - much longer than newer calculators that are more like locked-up smartphones in design, and have similar battery life.

Kids all have distracting smartphones already. It's not like back in the day where it was either Drug Wars on the TI-83+ or nothing.

BlockDude was solid, and there were a number of decent assembly games for the 83+, and especially the 84.

I see the site is still up, 20 years later: https://ticalc.org/

Oh wow I forgot all about that game!

This looks like a worse version of the one I used, the TI nspire CX CAS, for about the same price.

Both the CG50 and nspire has working Numworks ports (although very slow), if you wanted something more fancy on the same hardware.

https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon/issues/327

Crap, this thread revealed to me that the developer of Giac/Xcas basically gave up on using git altogether due to its complexity/poor workflow. I'm profoundly annoyed that the worse DVCS won, became a monopoly, and that a whole generation which hasn't seen better just accepts its quirks without a second thought.

I heard that TI put in a lot of work lobbying and getting their products in textbooks to get to where they're at

Here's a 3D Minecraft clone I was working on for this calculator: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1135251023435415633...

When I was in undergrad, I had a lose reproduction of Super Mario 3 on my TI-89 graphing calculator. It got me through so many calculus lectures!

Thread hijack: where can I get a replacement screen? Mine is very scratched up.

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