[HN Gopher] Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators
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Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators
Author : 27theo
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-01-27 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| 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?
| Ambroisie wrote:
| This looks like a worse version of the one I used, the TI
| nspire CX CAS, for about the same price.
| maven29 wrote:
| 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
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I heard that TI put in a lot of work lobbying and getting their
| products in textbooks to get to where they're at
| 27theo wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 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.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| 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/
| stn8188 wrote:
| Oh wow I forgot all about that game!
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| Unfortunate project name
| omoikane wrote:
| Maybe it's a homage to the naming scheme of another NES
| emulator:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESticle
| dancemethis wrote:
| I mean, in a way yes, but in another not...
|
| Genecyst as NESticle's sister can provide better context.
| y-curious wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. They should look to my designer earthquake
| brand, Fashkism, for inspiration.
| ajdude wrote:
| 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!
| int_19h wrote:
| 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/
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(page generated 2024-01-27 23:00 UTC)