>They were also VERY suspicious any time you had your graphing calculator out outside math class, and some of the ruder study hall attendants would clear your calculators memory of games.
That would have been a huge bummer becuase I wasn't playing games on mine, I was writing programs. It was actually the start of my professional programming career technically. I sold a copy of the program I wrote via link cable to a fellow student for $1... 8 years before apple was selling $1 mobile apps ;)
The very first thing you did is write a program that prints a pixel-perfect "memory reset successfully" message to the screen as if you had just cleared it yourself :)
yep, remember doing exactly this for the ti-84+ CE. god bless third-party TI-BASIC documentation websites.
better than making it seem like you had just done it yourself, you could use the Menu() function to simulate all the menu navigation necessary to actually get to that screen!
funnily enough, jabbing all the buttons on the calculator and having to select functions via menu listings created one of the comfiest development environments I've ever used. after a while, banging out a screensaver or fake menu became second nature.
I'm not a big BASIC fan, so I've done my stuff in C, since it was a Motorola 68k on the TI-Voyage 200. I don't remember exactly how (it's 15+ year ago), but you could mark your app as a "system app" which was not removed during a factory reset.
Add a cryptic name, blank screen on start with a short timeout to return to menu when a key combination is not pressed and nobody will ever notice.
Crazy because I started playing games on the calc and then at something in HS I got a new Ti-84 and student read the full manual and realized you could actually code programs in that thing.
I had a TI Voyage 200 in highschool and wrote programs to solve whatever new problems were assigned and that's part of the reason I'm not very good at math.
That would have been a huge bummer becuase I wasn't playing games on mine, I was writing programs. It was actually the start of my professional programming career technically. I sold a copy of the program I wrote via link cable to a fellow student for $1... 8 years before apple was selling $1 mobile apps ;)