BCALL of the Day - CalcG.org

BCALL of the Day

allynfolksjr

Brandon Wilson has started a page which tracks the recent unnamed BCALLs he has documented in the course of this project. Since he had 365 left, and knowing his basic knowledge that a non-leap year contains roughly 365 days, it seemed perfect as the digital equivalent of a daily calendar. That starts March 7th. Needless to say, check out the site if you enjoy programming, reading cynical comments, or just love calculators in general.

10 May 2007, 21:03 GMT

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Re: BCALL of the Day	Barrett
cool --- -Barrett A
	10 May 2007, 21:16 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	allynfolksjr
I agree... I've been meaning to feature this for like the past month.
	10 May 2007, 21:17 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	haveacalc
It's good for us programmers, but I'm sure that TI's pissed. I mean, they went out of their way to condemn the practice of disassembling their things... --- -quoted directly from most movies that don't exist (and some that do).
	10 May 2007, 21:22 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	brandonw
How have they done that? I've done far worse to piss them off and haven't gotten any complaints so far.
	11 May 2007, 01:20 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	haveacalc
I guess the only real thing would be on this page, under "Restrictions" (they call it reverse-assembling). Maybe they only dislike people stealing their code, but I would have thought they would have documented the secret B_CALLs for the public they were ok with the common man knowing of them. Keep in mind that I'm still all for you doing this... --- -quoted directly from most movies that don't exist (and some that do).
	11 May 2007, 13:48 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	allynfolksjr
I really don't expect they care that we can now draw horizontal lines with a BCALL. :)
	11 May 2007, 17:15 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	threefingeredguy
Haha. He's giving them good names so far. --- Someone call for an exterminator?
	10 May 2007, 21:40 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	allynfolksjr
I agree... they're highly excellent.
	11 May 2007, 09:39 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	banjo2E
BCALLs are ASM stuff, right? Because I would love to make something with custom error messages. Like in that one game of mine where I had the obviously-a-menu "ERR:DUMBASS" message. I think that was my crappy first game. Edit: I notice that it's not even close to being daily. --- http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Administrator <------ WOOOOO!!!!!
	11 May 2007, 05:47 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	threefingeredguy
facepalm.jpg --- Someone call for an exterminator?
	11 May 2007, 08:28 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	banjo2E
http://www.snafu-comics.com/forums Actually, no. You just [sixth word on that page] @ life. Like everyone else in the world, except for God, Satan, and Blizzard. LOL Starcraft. --- http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Administrator <------ WOOOOO!!!!!
	11 May 2007, 15:10 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	allynfolksjr
Only the best jpg ever.
	11 May 2007, 17:15 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	brandonw
Yes, and there are two of those custom error messages, that's why the one on the page is ErrCustom1. I've found many, many more than what's on that page, I just don't feature them all. The complete list of everything is here.
	11 May 2007, 17:19 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	gulyman
I know that most of you are so uber in assembly that you forget the little guys, but could someone non-sarcasticaly explain what a B Call is and why you would want to know them. I asume that they are the sign that matches a command so the OS knows what you want to do, but that is just a guess.
	11 May 2007, 19:01 GMT

Re: BCALL of the Day	brandonw
BCALLs are routines in the TI-OS. It's short for "banked call" (or so I'd like to think). You know how Ion, MirageOS, and other shells have routines available for you to use, like ionFastCopy? It's the same thing...the OS provides lots of routines that make things easier for you. You COULD implement the routines yourself, but that's a waste of space when they already exist. Some BCALLs do things for you that you CAN'T do by yourself (like _Arc_Unarc, for example, which archives a variable...something you can't do on your own). They work through the restart command on the z80, specfically "rst 28h." That's basically the same as "call 0028h" and there is a routine located at 0028h on page 0 of the OS which will swap in the OS page containing the routine you want to use, call it, and then swap the old page back. It handles all the ickiness of calling these routines yourself. The official ti83plus.inc contains around 1300 BCALLs on the 83+ series, but there were several hundred (about 430) that weren't known or even named. The purpose of this project is to find out what they all do, give them a name, and give them full documentation, if possible. Since starting this, I've discovered quite a few nifty things, and WikiTI has some more information on that. Hopefully that made some sense.
	11 May 2007, 19:48 GMT