Wednesday, September 29, 2010

A quick summary of some TI-85 emulators

I tried a few TI-85 emulators, hoping that they would be more convenient than testing code on a real calculator. Here are some observations using my version 9 TI-85 ROM:
  • Wabbitemu has a nice user interface. The TI-86 skin looks great, and it's nice how I get visual feedback when I press buttons. I don't mind that it's not a TI-85 skin. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to transfer TI-85 files to the emulator, so it's useless for development.
  • TilEm 0.972 looks kind of ugly due to the scaled up low resolution skin, and the screen standing out too much. Multiple attempts to transfer a backup to the calculator failed, and so I couldn't use it for running assembler programs. I couldn't get 0.973 to display the skin.
  • Virtual TI 2.5 has some problems, but it is usable. In Windows 7, it has to be run as Administrator (or else I get a "Failed to set data for 'LastEmuVersion'" error). I've had some linking failures, but I was generally able to transfer a backup after resetting the calculator. When transferring variables, I got annoying linking errors whenever a variable under that name exist, so I'm forced to delete variables before re-uploading them. The skin looks worse than Wabbitemu, but it is a TI-85 skin which looks like my TI-85, and it looks a lot better than TilEm.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I work as one of the developers for Wabbitemu. I stumbled on this blog and thought I should mention that the issues transferring files to the TI-85 have been fixed. It also now includes an 85 skin.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting your reviews. I was having a hard time with Virtual TI working. Now I have other options. Thanks again.