MaxCoderz

I finished up an early beta of the final release. Please give it a try! For the casual user this should be a big upgrade, but developers should wait for the next release where the debugger will be included.

Here's what to try:

• Skinless mode - The new default mode is skinless. Some users found the skin to be too large, especially for smaller resolutions. You can toggle the skin on and off.
• Options panel - The option panel has a new sheet for configuring the screen settings. This is useful for programmers with custom grayscale routines that don't appear correctly on the default settings. These settings carry over to GIF, so your captures will be cleaner.
• GIF quality - By default, GIFs are recorded in 2x high quality mode. This will generate large files, but are much better and easier to see on webpages. You can change these options.
• GIF Feedback - GIF recording gives visual feedback. The screen will glow and pulsate while the file is being written.
• Variable tree - You can access a variable tree that will show you what files are on the calculator. In addition, you can drag these files from the tree to your harddrive.
• Instant screenshot - Drag the screen to generate a bitmap instantly. A transparent bitmap will show you exactly what you are capturing.
• Savestate Preview - The open dialog now shows previews of savestates you select. Here's an example: http://group.revsoft.org/savepreview.png
• Cutout mode - When the skin is in cutout mode, small minimize and close buttons appear in the top right corner. In addition the skin will fade when the emulator is not the foreground window.
• Button feedback - When you press buttons on the skin, the buttons will appear to depress. This even happens when you press keyboard keys corresponding to those buttons.
• Registry - Settings are stored in the registry, so no config file will be generated.

Some things that don't work yet:

• Debugger - There have been improvements, but it's not stable enough yet to release
• Transfers to TI-82 - New virtual linking code doesn't support non-silent linking that's required for the TI-82.
• Multiple skins - I'm working on more skins, but only the default TI-83+ skin is included in this version.

Download Wabbitemu

Excellent work! One thing I noticed is that the application icon is at a lower resolution to the previous version I had installed, though that's a minor cosmetic issue. I really like the degree of polish in the emulator!

If you don't mind some blatent self-publicity, I wrote some brief documentation on using IThumbnailProvider from .NET to provide an Explorer thumbnailer (Vista's new API for thumbnailers makes this nice and easy).

Oh fantastic, I knew there was an interface but I hadn't looked into it. Great article by the way. My first attempt will undoubtedly be C, but I'll fall back on .NET if that fails horribly. I started that preview dialog over a year ago when I was still running XP, but it's certainly obsolete if you implement IThumbnailProvider.

As for the icon, I noticed something odd was going on. I'll make sure the final version has 256x256 PNG icon included, that oughta take care of it. You might enjoy this brief Vista experiment:

The purpose of the play button is still up for interpretation. I believe I had to link UxThemes to draw that bitmap on glass.

I hope that doesn't somehow break XP support by doing things that XP doesn't recognize?

Spencer wrote:My first attempt will undoubtedly be C, but I'll fall back on .NET if that fails horribly.

Well, it's only available in Vista which means that using .NET isn't such a problem, as Vista users will have .NET 3.0 installed as standard anyway.

I started that preview dialog over a year ago when I was still running XP, but it's certainly obsolete if you implement IThumbnailProvider.

Explorer thumbnailers need registered COM objects and file associations to work, which isn't that practical with the single exe distribution method (and, of course, your method works fine on XP, which most people are still using).

You might enjoy this brief Vista experiment:
<image snipped>
The purpose of the play button is still up for interpretation. I believe I had to link UxThemes to draw that bitmap on glass.

Nice! DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea seems to be part of dwmapi.dll, though I haven't really found a use for it yet.

On a more practical front; is there way yet for external tools to set up the initial state of the emulator (loading files, setting breakpoints, loading labels &c)?

King Harold wrote:I hope that doesn't somehow break XP support by doing things that XP doesn't recognize?

Nope, it should still be fully compatible with XP.

benryves wrote:On a more practical front; is there way yet for external tools to set up the initial state of the emulator (loading files, setting breakpoints, loading labels &c)?

Like I mentioned earlier, a COM Interface might not be a bad idea. Let me see if I can get something working.

Well, I see it's already in motion, but I'd like to 2nd that file-loading idea.

Something tifreak pointed out on #tcpa is that save states don't appear to work under Vista (I tried running the same executable on Windows 2000, where it worked fine). It prompts you to save, then brings up the meta-data dialog, but never actually appears to save the file...

One thing I always wanted to see integrated into a TI83 emulator is some kind of keyboard input parser, which would let you type out full keywords into an input buffer, then the program would empty the buffer as keywords were typed in.
So for example, you could type out "sin(X)", "randInt(5,3)", "e^N", "[[7][5]]", etc and it would turn it into a sequence of tokens. Maybe pick longest matches first.
Maybe, in order to implement this, send a getkey via silent link protocol, simulate the correct keystrokes to type out the symbols, or even hook into the getkey romcall.

The Edit->Paste command is supposed to do just that for already complete expressions. I haven't done it yet but I'll get to it eventually.

As a buffer to actual input to the calc, that's an interesting idea. That would even make the calculator quite useful as a desktop app (assuming it's your ROM of course).