Introducing the new Ndless SDK

Ever wanted to build the next killing hack for the TI-Nspire, write another amazing emulator or port one of the hundred SDL-based games and applications with nSDL?

Ndless now has a fully fledged Software Development Kit which makes development of Ndless-compatible native programs easier than ever. The SDK features:

  • Development tools provided as a single installation-less package, to edit, build and test your own programs
  • A SciTE-based editor tuned for C development for the TI-Nspire
  • 1-click project creation and build
  • TI-Nspire emulator integration, with automatic program transfer
  • nspireio and nSDL libraries integration

Get the Ndless SDK and follow the new 10 minute step-by-step tutorial!

OS Patching

Levak and tangrs hit again with two interesting TI-Nspire OS patchers.

tangrs’s nspire-version-patcher (and Levak’s enhanced version vPatch) let us assign an arbitrary OS version name/number, useful to dismiss Student Software’s annoying v3.2 OS update notification.

Levak’s cx2cxc makes the TI-Nspire CX OS behave like a the chinese flavor CX-C… and makes the english-chinese dictionary installation possible :)

Both patches are compatible with Ndless’s startup feature.

More nice TI-Nspire native stuff

Ndless was built to give advanced users and hackers full control over the TI-Nspire for extension, customization and experiment. Ndless would obviously be useless without users’ native (C or ARM assembly) programs authored with its SDK. Interesting ones were lately released that you shouldn’t miss.

Levak’s ThemeEditor gives access to the hidden built-in colors customization features of the TI-Nspire OS. The latest version supports community themes importation/exportation.

AlexRider38’s bloody theme would for example make your home screen looks like this:

lkj submitted a classic but sweet Pacman for Omnimaga.org‘s programming contest which 2012 theme was Artificial Intelligence. Math, Science and Computer Science are actually not far from each other, and Pacman on the TI-Nspire should prove it. Curious ones should have a look at its source code.

critor’s original author of TNOC, the computer-side memory saving utility and downgrade protection breaker for the TI-Nspire has released an on-calc Ndless-based version of it called nTNOC. Try it if you want to optimize your memory space without having to reinstall the OS as required by the original TNOC.

Finally the famous author of the GB/GBC emulator for TI-Nspire calc84maniac will hopefully hit again with the GBA emulator he’s working on, a rather difficult challenge for such a constrained device the TI-Nspire is.

(credits to tiplanet.org for the preview).

An update of the Ndless SDK should soon be released to make the set up easier and provide a pre-configured editor for C development with built-in options for project creation, build and program emulation.

If you are learning C or are already a C developer, pushing the limit further is just a few clicks (and lines of code) away…

Yet another Luna update + oclua for 3.2

Luna v0.3a fixes a compatibility problem with some unicode characters such as chinese ones. Sorry about it and thanks wtof1996 for reporting it.

It also skips the UTF-8 BOM added by some text editor to the .lua file to convert. Hopefully the popup  “An error was found in the format of this document” won’t annoy you anymore.

oclua (v0.1a) has also been rebuilt with this Luna to you let you use the new OS 3.2 Lua API.

The release of a possible official on-calc Lua editor is being too much delayed by TI. oclua was more of a proof-of-concept than an application ready to use. Fortunately yatto has worked on a nice editor called LuaCS which you can find on the French tiplanet.org. It features syntax highlighting, code snippets and indentation. Translation of menus is under way. It doesn’t yet offer native integration of a code runner and must be used together with oclua. Levak has started to work on this in his own (currently unstable) fork .


TI’s integration of Lua in the TI-Nspire was a first step for an officially supported true development experience, but is far from being complete. Let us put these projects to good use and explore how we can benefit from the new OS 3.2 Chipmunk-based physics engine!

Luna updated: compatibility with OS v3.2 and special characters

v0.3 of Luna is now available!

  • This version can generate Lua programs compatible with OS v3.2’s new Lua API. Thanks to jimbauwens for the hint.
  • It also fixes conversion issues with Lua scripts and documents which contain special characters. The whole UTF-8 encoding space is now supported, just make sure to save your input file in UTF-8.

Luna is a lightweight, portable, command-line Lua to TNS converter for TI-Nspire developers. It has been used for now nearly a year by Windows, Mac and Linux users as an alternative to TI’s official SDK to streamline their Lua development cycle. It is also used to generate custom TI-Nspire documents with full control on their format.

Luna powers Deep Thought online Lua converter and tiplanet.org’s nCreator, a Web-based Notes editor.

Counting

27 months since Ndless v1.0 was released, opening the TI-Nspire calculator to third-party development,

28000 downloads of Ndless v3.1 since January 2012,

3.2 compatibility hopefully coming.

Thank you for your support!

Graphics!

Long was the time when Ndless introduced rudimentary graphics functions such as setPixel() in its Particles demo… The lack of a fully-fledged GUI API has for a long time discouraged many developers from trying their hands on native development on the TI-Nspire.

Two major contributions are about to make significant changes on our development experience with Ndless:

  • totorigolo has released v0.3 of his nRGBlib library, which adds double-buffering, arbitrary image drawing and a desktop map editor [download]
  • hoffa has worked hard on nSDL [topic on Omnimaga], a port of the popular multimedia SDL library. The latest version even includes smooth mouse support. Credits to atiatini for the plasma effect.

No more excuse not to try out native development on the TI-Nspire!