VIDEO: It's Doom 2 Running on a Color Calculator

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joytech22

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LOL.. Our calculators are now doing what computers did like 10-15 years ago..
What the heck are calculators of 2022 going to be able to do..? :|

Let alone computers..
 

Travis Beane

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Paid $100 for a bloody calculator, and had two stolen in a year... There must have been some reason the TI 83+ costs so bloody much. I'll admit, it does have great battery life, but I'd sooner use a bloody smartphone. Waiting a few minutes for it to do a calculation; doing complex equations and running out of memory; refusing to work when it's cold (I live in Canada, of course it's going to get cold in my book bag).
People have been making games for these for quite a while though. Neat to see there's finally something playable.
 

nottheking

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I always felt that graphing calculators were a huge rip-off: like textbooks, they're grossly overpriced because he makers know that students need them. The prices made sense back in the 1980s and 1990s, when such computing devices in a tiny space were unheard of. The Ti-83, -84, and -89 series were still just antiquated 1980s technology re-hashed over and over again. Until the Ti-89, the CPU was was a feeble Z80; some here might recall that was the kind of CPU used in the original Game Boy.

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.
 

ananthu123

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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).
 

NuclearShadow

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Bravo to those who made it. I would have never guessed a calculator was capable of such a task.

[citation][nom]Super_Nova[/nom]Can it play Crysis?[/citation]

Only on High, Ultra gets unacceptable performance.
 

alidan

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[citation][nom]joytech22[/nom]LOL.. Our calculators are now doing what computers did like 10-15 years ago..What the heck are calculators of 2022 going to be able to do..? :|Let alone computers..[/citation]

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.

 

demonhorde665

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oh just beautiful as if us american's and the youth of today don't already have enough ways to screw off when we should be working ... this is exactly why teh economy is at a state of fail , no one does any real work any more.
 

demonhorde665

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actually calculators in general are bad for society they are causing deminshed mental capacity of even our smartest people. My step dad went to college for a masters in electrical engineering , and he did not ever once use a calculator for his work.
 

g00ey

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I want to be impressed but calculators these days are essentially low budget mini computers. I must say that I was more impressed when a guy managed to make Quake 3 run on a MeeGo device.

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 ...
 

billybobser

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[citation][nom]demonhorde665[/nom]actually calculators in general are bad for society they are causing deminshed mental capacity of even our smartest people. My step dad went to college for a masters in electrical engineering , and he did not ever once use a calculator for his work.[/citation]

'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.
 

Tmanishere

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[citation][nom]g00ey[/nom]I want to be impressed but calculators these days are essentially low budget mini computers. I must say that I was more impressed when a guy managed to make Quake 3 run on a MeeGo device.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 ...[/citation]

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.
 

nottheking

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[citation][nom]ananthu123[/nom]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).[/citation]
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.

[citation][nom]demonhorde665[/nom]actually calculators in general are bad for society they are causing deminshed mental capacity of even our smartest people. My step dad went to college for a masters in electrical engineering , and he did not ever once use a calculator for his work.[/citation]
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.
 

g00ey

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[citation][nom]billybobser[/nom]...[/citation]
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.
 

nottheking

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[citation][nom]gto127[/nom]The demo is actually the first stage of Doom 1. Not sure why they named it Doom 2. Still one of my favorie FPS.[/citation]
If you continued to watch, they also load up and play the first level of Doom 2.

[citation][nom]g00ey[/nom]it is convenient but you learn nothing from it.[/citation]
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)
 
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Deleted member 431422

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"nottheking" ... gooey is talking about regular people, not students of engineering. He is right in what he said. People get use to solving problems by pressing few buttons that they no longer know what they are doing. The article is about calculator for things I know nothing off, so I guess people who need them do some really complicated stuff which would be otherwise tedious and time consuming (I finished mechanic high school, so i had a glance how tedious calculation regarding material strength can be). So yeah, they might need them. Majority of population could well do without calculators in everyday life.
 

11796pcs

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When talking about the calculator's affect on society, I think some immediately point to the dumb students who are so tied to their calculators that they don't know what the fractions 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 are in decimal form by memory (yes it's scary but some don't know). I don't think these students reflect all of society. The students who have to use their calculators for everything are generally students who get poor grades anyway. The majority of students who use a calculator I believe know how to slove problems without one because our educational system does a good job in teaching how to solve problems by hand (especially in the early grades). I think the bigger problem is that a majority of the teenagers growing up in our society look at the professional sports teams and movie stars and believe that they don't need to learn anyhing in school because they will be these famous people when they grow up. Or they set their goals low and say they will work in a factory when they grow up (of course these jobs are now disappearing). I believe this trend in society started to develop around the same time technology was gaining in prominence and that we use technology as a scapegoat for the fact that our society is getting lazier and stupider because of the media. I think calculators make math accessable to those who would otherwise not even try to learn.
 
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