from Hacker News

Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators

by 27theo on 1/27/24, 2:18 PM with 19 comments

  • by int_19h on 1/27/24, 9:02 PM

    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/

  • by godzillabrennus on 1/27/24, 3:01 PM

    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?

  • by circuit10 on 1/28/24, 1:07 AM

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

  • by ajdude on 1/27/24, 4:45 PM

    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!

  • by skripp on 1/27/24, 11:25 PM

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