I seem to remember that TI Connect on Windows ditched support for "legacy" calcs like the 86 even back when it first came out, though I could be remembering that wrong. But yeah, if you (@Switchblade) could answer DJ Omnimaga's questions, and also tell us which linking software and cable you're using, that might provide a clue. Also, you might try using TILP to transfer the files to the calculator if you haven't already; I seem to recall that there were a few strangely-formatted 86 files out there that can confuse some link programs into transferring bad data. As I recall, TILP can properly handle several of the nonstandard variations.

Sounds reasonable enough; I've added it.

Also, I reformatted the whole table because it was growing too many columns and starting to get really scrunched (it was originally designed back when there were only a handful of calc models). Now, the supported calcs are simply listed in a row without trying to vertically align each model. The drawback is that you can no longer as conveniently scan down a column to find emulators for a particular model. Would this be a problem for anyone?

I don't consider myself that great at trying to understand speech with too much noise, either. I often have trouble working out unfamiliar syllable/accent patterns even in crystal-clear speech, for that matter. (But I also get kind of OCD about trying to understand every single word, which means rewinding a TV show a million times and then giving up and turning on the closed captioning just to figure out one particular word. Very annoying, but that's a whole different story. :lol:)

I've to the conclusion that (at least in my case) the odd dips in sound level I'm hearing are likely just my headphones. Whether that's considered normal or a result of headphone age/wear I have no idea, but I got different results when listening with desktop speakers. Also, reading around, it seems that my cutoff frequency of around 15 kHz is considered more or less normal for my age.

Oh yes, the Shepard tone is pretty cool.

One more random tidbit I thought I'd throw in: According to Wikipedia, there are animals like certain bats and whales that can hear beyond 100 kHz but not below 1 to 10 kHz, which means they probably can't hear human speech at all.

Discovered some nice tunes recently while watching Games Done Quick's feed:

Little Samson (mainly the "Golem's Theme" track)
Gremlins 2: The New Batch, especially the level music
(both NES Sunsoft games)

Shantae, a little-known Game Boy Color game developed by WayForward and released by Capcom in 2002, a year after the Game Boy Advance had come out. Jake Kaufman composed some impressive stuff that almost sounds like it uses more sound channels than the GBC actually has!

The Game Boy Turok games make excellent use of the voices, too. Alberto Jose Gonzalez is a pretty cool composer; he also did music for NES Asterix and The Smurfs.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 05, 2017, 05:45:15 AM
@Travis you forgot to add CEmu to the emulator list D:

Oh, I thought people were recommending that I only add Firebird. Looking back at the previous posts, though, I think I just misunderstood.

Looking here, though, it seems to say there are no official "stable" binary releases yet. Perhaps we should wait until then? (Though there appear to be what I guess would be considered "development snapshot" releases for Windows.)

Quote from: Adriweb on March 05, 2017, 11:34:15 AM
Also for getting an Nspire ROM, see here: https://github.com/nspire-emus/firebird/wiki/First-Time-Setup (I noticed the ticalc tutorial didn't have an nspire section on that page)

Thanks! I'll look into that.

Okay, done! http://www.ticalc.org/programming/emulators/software.html

Let me know if anything needs to be changed or corrected.

I've heard of "laser" rot (oxidation) from poorly-manufactured discs, and I've had various recordable discs go bad just by sitting there (I've come across some really crappy CD-Rs manufactured by some companies back in the day), so it's sadly not news to me. These days it's safest to rip everything valuable and save it to a variety of types of storage media (and then be prepared to do it again before those fail or become obsolete).

On the other hand, I've burned a few hundred DVD-R and DVD+R discs over the last several years, and those mostly seem to be holding up still. There were a couple in that entire batch that inexplicably started turning yellow and becoming unreadable, and one was completely unrecoverable. I'm not sure how that happened; my best theory is that because they were stored next to a window for a few years, certain discs got exposed to too much sunlight and got degraded and discolored. (I had some pens and pencils stored in the same area whose erasers got hard and bad, even though the same ones stored in my dresser for the same number of years didn't; maybe due to sunlight/UV as well?)

I hadn't yet heard of WiFi killing discs, though. I wouldn't have expected the amount of microwave energy from a typical WiFi device (which is almost a million times weaker than that in a microwave oven, and diffused in all directions rather than concentrated in a small metal box) to be anywhere high enough to do any harm. I would be more worried about intense visible light exposure, especially from sources like the sun. After all, they're designed to be written to using nothing more than a powerful enough source of red/IR light. So it's not a bad idea to store -R/RW discs away from sources of bright light when not in use.

I used to use a program on Linux called DVDisaster, which allows you to create extra recovery ECC data files for recordable data CD/DVDs. I often used it to recover discs that started developing bad sectors. As long as you still had the ECC data, you could recover data from discs with a surprising amount of damage. The ECC data takes up maybe 1/6 or so of the space of the original disc, so it saves a lot of space over making a full copy, but the downside is that it's entirely useless if you aren't able to recover at least some of the data from the original copy (e.g., if you have the ECC but the whole disc goes bad or gets lost and have no other copies, you're still screwed). You also have to store the ECC data somewhere and separately protect it from damage, and keep it up to date if you modified the original discs, so it was bit of a hassle. More recently, I've been moving away from optical discs, and I don't miss them (they suck in reliability and compatibility and are as slow as molasses). I mostly use HDDs/SSDs or flash media now and only use optical discs when I have to.

Quick question, sorry if I overlooked the answer somewhere (this is about adding Firebird to the ticalc.org emulators chart): Is this for all Nspire models or particular ones? i.e., out of the TI-Nspire, TI-Nspire CAS, and TI-Nspire CX pages, should this be listed on all of them or just some?

Quote from: JWinslow23 on December 25, 2016, 07:19:13 AM
Because I made some new courses.

I think the methods and mechanics I use in these are pretty creative. Perhaps someone else can use them for more polished levels. Tell me what you think!

Those are pretty creative! How did you come up with them?

I liked "Don't Tap Left". It took a few tries to wrap my head around it, but I soon got the hang of it. Same with the Mario Kart level; I was a little confused at first when I thought I was going in circles, but when I remembered the Mario Kart theme, I got the idea that it was keeping track of laps. That's pretty cool. Haven't yet managed to get through "Pacifist: Don't...Shoot" without killing anything yet (unfortunately, the enemies didn't themselves bother reading the name of the level).

Studying the levels to figure out how the mechanics work is fun, too, because the first thing I wondered is how you did that.

I'm pretty new to the MM stuff but thought it'd be fun to play with, so we got it back around Christmas. Here's my first "real" level:

38F9-0000-02EB-A039
"I Just Want a Blinkin' P-Switch!"

I wonder if maybe I got a little carried away with the length or difficulty, but there were just so many concepts I wanted to try out. So if anyone happens to try it and wants to give feedback/criticism, feel free.

I plan to try out other levels posted here once I get a chance; they sound interesting!

The first thing I really started programming was the TI-81, which I believe I got around my birthday in 1994. Technically, I had a TI-99/4A computer when I was four or five (would have been somewhere around the mid-late '80s) and sometimes played with the programming examples in the manuals, but I don't count that because I could barely read yet and didn't really know what I was doing. I even had the tape recorder and attachment but couldn't understand what it was for or how to hook it up, so I never got to find out what that was like. Mostly we just played cartridge games on it (we only had three or four; they were hard to find). Then sometime later, that went away and we had an NES instead. Too bad Famicom BASIC never made it to North America.

I had a TI-82, then 85, by '96 or so. I got hold of another 99/4A early in '97 but didn't have anything other than Munch Man (no tape attachments or anything else), so I couldn't do much with it. (I was also surprised how slow BASIC on it was; my TI calcs were probably much faster!) Then we got an aunt's old 80386 computer later in '97, I think, and QBasic was awesome compared to anything else I had done. Made a few nifty (to me) programs in it eventually and tried to make a game or two, one of which was playable but never quite finished (I got bored making levels, and my coding skills weren't that great yet so I never managed to get passwords or 2-player mode working). Got a TI-86 in Christmas '98, and messed with it a lot, though I found the slow BASIC execution speed quite limiting.

Early 2000s, I dabbled in TI-86 ASM programming a bit, but not much, since I had an 89 and 68k C looked more enticing. I stuck with that for a while (along with extensive TI-BASIC coding on my TI-89) and eventually gained some familiarity with C that way. This lasted until roughly the mid 2000s, then late 2000s I got an HP 50g (my first HP calc) and got familiar with UserRPL and SysRPL. During this decade I learned better techniques, and my programming and debugging skills improved significantly.

Lately I haven't done a lot of calc programming, though I've been developing some personal tools with Python on my desktop computer. My favorite programming language actually has remained Python for the last 10–15 years. This is what introduced me to object-oriented programming, which I've been using for a while but am still getting better at.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on December 08, 2016, 08:47:53 PMAh that's a shame, because ticalc.org is the main TI community hub so it would have gotten extra visibility there. But it's your choice. At least it would be good if @Travis added it to the emulators page if that hasn't been done already and link to the Github page, because there isn't even a single emulator for the Nspire listed there, not even nspire_emu. Even CEmu isn't there.

Thanks for the mention. The static content is virtually unmaintained right now due to lack of time to research things, so I'm really dependent on people pointing things out to me to change/update on those pages. I'll stick this on the to-do list, and if someone could give me links to the other Nspire emulators, that will be helpful.

I'm 34, and I don't know of any of those ultrasonic mice repellents ever being used around me.

I tried the clips on the noiseaddicts site DJ posted. 14 kHz appeared to be the highest I can hear, except for on the 21 kHz clip only, I hear a faint, lower hum that definitely doesn't sound like 21 kHz. I got a similar effect with certain frequencies in Audacity above 20 kHz, but not the same ones. I still think there's some kind of aliasing going on.

So I set the project sample rate to 96 kHz instead of the usual 48 kHz (don't know if my sound card can actually do 96 kHz, but figured I'd give it a try), and the weird phantom tones at frequencies above what I can hear disappeared.

Then I realized that the faint clicks that happen when a sound starts and stops seemed to be having a psychological effect of making me think I was hearing the tone when I really wasn't (because the clicks were cluing me in to when the tone started and stopped), so I went through a series of tones in Audacity with quick fade-outs at the end to avoid the clicks. Then, if I could tell that the tone stopped with my eyes closed, I decided I could hear the sound. So now, finally, it looks like roughly 15,300 Hz is the frequency where I begin to have trouble reliably recognizing the tone, at least with the headphones I'm using.

And I thought determining my hearing range was going to be a simple task.

I tried the test again with one ear at a time, and the results I got are still consistent; that is, where the sound appeared to pan to the right, I heard a dip in volume when playing it just in my left ear.

However, I also found that while the dips always seem to occur at roughly the same points, the effect seems to vary slightly depending on exactly how the headphone cups are positioned on my ears. So I have some suspicion that at least some of this is due to the headphones. If I manage to find a different set to test, I'll report the results of those.

Another thing I discovered: the waveform this video plays seems to be altered a bit, presumably due to the lossy audio compression. So I can hear aliasing noise (or some other artifact) at frequencies above and below my actual threshold of hearing, which makes it confusing to tell the actual range. When I generate and play raw, uncompressed sine wave tones in Audacity at those frequencies I don't get this noise. The spectrograms of the raw sine tones vs. the ones in the video also appear different even though the waveforms look and sound more or less the same. Finally, it's possible that the high frequencies are actually filtered a bit when the video is encoded for quality reasons (again, to suit the audio encoding scheme used).

So, I think a more accurate test would require a video using only uncompressed or losslessly-compressed audio.

Just for the record, the way I listened to the test video was by setting the volume to the maximum that the loudest-sounding frequencies were still comfortable to hear, then left it there. I didn't crank it up further to try to hear the high frequencies better. Under these conditions, my hearing range is apparently 30 Hz to around 14–15 KHz right now.

I listen to music on headphones frequently, but usually no more than a couple of hours or so at a time. I prefer decent or maybe even rather high volume but try not to go overboard. But I have no idea what sound level it would equate to. Other than that, I'm not normally exposed to loud noises.

It's known that people inevitably lose the ability to hear high sounds as they age, though frequent exposure to loud sounds without protection accelerates the process.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on December 06, 2016, 07:38:17 PM
@Travis have you tried putting one of your ear next to each speaker while blocking your other ear to see if it makes any difference? Try with each ear. If you see a difference then maybe your hearing abilities became slightly different from ear to ear?

That makes sense. Maybe I'll try it with the headphones on and playing sound out of just the left side, then the right side, and see. I seem to remember listening to some demonstrations of some interesting auditory illusions once that involved left vs. right ear sounds but can't remember what it was now.

QuoteIn my case I used to be able to hear very high pitched sounds slightly when at max volume, such as this in 2009 https://www.omnimaga.org/humor-and-jokes/if-your-over-18-you-wont-hear-anything/ , but I just listened to that MP3 clip Eeems posted in that thread and nowadays it's no longer the case. On http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearing-test/ , 14 KHz is the max I am able to hear. That said, headphone quality might come into play there, but I could be wrong. I am using $25 headphones right now (from back when the only expensive headphones being sold in Canada were EB Game exclusive's Turtle Beach)

My headphones are a Seinnheiser model and were much over $25 (I don't remember the exact cost but it was over $100; I bought them several years ago), and I consider them very good quality. But it could be that another pair of headphones would give me another result. Unfortunately, I don't have another pair handy to test at the moment.

It could be that my onboard motherboard sound is crap quality, too. Who knows. (I will say that there's more noise and interference in the analog output than should be considered acceptable.)

I would certainly expect the quality of the speakers, headphones, and other equipment to play a big factor, so this stuff is tricky. At the very least, don't use something like a cheap $5 microcassette voice recorder and speaker to judge your hearing abilities or you might think you can't hear anything over 4000 Hz or so.