VIDEO: It's Doom 2 Running on a Color Calculator
It's Doom 2 running on a TI-Nspire CX graphing calculator... in color!
Are you sitting in Geometry class bored out of your mind, and all you can pull out of your pocket is a TI-Nspire CX graphing calculator? You're in luck, as TI Planet now offers a Doom 2 port, nDoom 2 Final, that actually runs the classic game in full color. That's right: instead of pushing in heavy numbers during an exam, you can shoot loads of buckshot into zombies and Imps, just don't let the teacher catch you.
Hack A Day reports that the game originally appeared in beta form a year ago, running in black and white on a hacked TI-83. Since then, several versions have been released, tweaking the controls and adding a menu system which switches out the menu seen in the original DOS-based retail version.
This specific release also adds the Ndless 3.1 program which unlocks the calculator's hardware, allowing users to perform their own hacks. Sound, unfortunately, still isn't present in nDoom 2, so don't let the video demo pasted below fool you.
What the heck are calculators of 2022 going to be able to do..? :|
Let alone computers..
What the heck are calculators of 2022 going to be able to do..? :|
Let alone computers..
People have been making games for these for quite a while though. Neat to see there's finally something playable.
This shows us an improvement that's a start, at least: we've moved to a more modern ARM CPU, and on the slowest models it runs at least at 90 MHz. While this probably won't let you run, say, Quake, it'll be sufficient for 386/486-era games. And the jump to 16MB+ of SDRAM (from 256KB from the best Ti-89 and -92s) really helps as well.
I think the answer is pretty self-evient.
It's the same reason the calculus textbooks you're using with it cost $150-200 (or more!) new.
These are both a result of the same thing... Having a Z80 @6MHz and only 32KB of RAM will do that for you.
one could buy a smartphone with an 800 mhz ARM at that price and use wolframalpha to do the calculation (atleast the pretty basic ones, including graphs).
It might be able to play Crysis 2, without the patch of course.
Only on High, Ultra gets unacceptable performance.
this is a graphing calculator correct? would a gpu like architecture benefit it? if so, it may get 3d games, but most likely nothing not programmed specifically for it, if we still have calculators that are stand alone by than.
I'm a little surprised that there is no good calculator software for smartphones/PDAs. I'm talking about real software where you can do 2D/3D plots, solve algebraic equations, compute integrals and derivatives, both numerically and symbolically.
Perhaps if there was a full blown version of Mathematica or Maple available for handhelds, then ...
'bad' for society. As for the diminshed mental capacity, it may have required genius on a level of Newton to handle integration, it's now approachable by those in school , however those on substantially higher level on intellect have moved far beyond that of a graphic calculator and are probably trying to mathematically nail down string theory (which I imagine a calculator is not going to help much).
As for your step dad, hey may not have had a calculator, but if he did anything remotely challenging, he probably had a lookup table for natural logarythms at least one. Paper calculator.
Some use calculators because they can't handle simple multiplication, some use calculators to save time on menial (time consuming) calculations to get shit done.
Not to mention, the built in calculators in todays modern EPOS tills now allow retards to jockey cash registers accurately.
I'm sure people thought of that. Problem is, how do you stop piracy? You don't have to worry about it when it's a dedicated calculator.
Exactly... While using add-on software or web services to handle these sort of thins on a phone is an inelegant solution compared to a dedicated device, cost-wise it makes a lot more sense. The main reason calculators still sell, then, is simply because they're required... And tests tend to ban the other things.
Your step dad certainly used a calculator. Just not an electronic digital one. Ever hear of a slide rule? How to use them is, in fact, one thing they taught in engineering school back then.
It's a false accusation that computers are causing people to dumb down. Rather, it's enabling people to accomplish things that had previously been entirely out of their league. Handling and computing mathematical matrices is something that was too cumbersome to be practical a few decades ago, in spite of their growing degree of criticality in the realm of physics... Now with computers we handle it without nary a thought. Similarly, thanks to computers, the level of precision in calculations (in terms of significant digits) has also gone up dramatically; those doing it by pencil-and-paper typically stop at 5 digits... Now, single-precision math does it at 7, and double-precision (which is used for all actual scientific and engineering applications) yields nearly 16 digits of precision.
As Bobser said, for some of us, we CAN handle menial math just fine; we just want to focus on the big, important things without sweating the small stuff. We'll handle the entire equation, while letting a computer handling the tiny addition and multiplication stuff.
No, demonhorde665 has a point. Things such as calculators, cell phones, television and GPS tend to dumb people down significantly. While there's nothing wrong with calculators per se it is very wrong with using them when for example teaching math.
A calculator sure is a good tool to have sometimes but in no way is it essential. If problems become so complicated that you can't solve them with pen and paper we're talking about problems that lie beyond what you can do with a basic calculator.
Most if not all integrals, differential equations and so on that can be solved symbolically can be solved with pen and paper. Sometimes you may need to use a mathematics handbook to save time and to make sure that you're on the right path but never a calculator. If you cannot solve it symbolically then you will need a computer, not a calculator. Admittedly it is nice to enter an expression into Mathematica and press enter; it is convenient but you learn nothing from it.
If you continued to watch, they also load up and play the first level of Doom 2.
Here's the crux of where you're of on your reasoning: those of us doing engineering and scientific work are beyond being in grade school, and often beyond any school at all. There's no point in repeating stuff you already quite thoroughly know and understand. It's like saying you should always keep doing long division, or writing out problems when they're simple enough to do mentally.
When there's no learning to be done, there is zero point to writing things out and taking vastly longer to solve an equation other than killing trees. And in the REAL world, when there's a REASON we're doing all this math, time is at a premium: one can't afford to waste time. (believe it or not, there's a use for math outside of the classroom! It's called science and engineering)