zlacker

>>lewisf+(OP)
As far as I can tell the TI graphing calculators are riding entirely off of mind share/familiarity, both among students and teachers, and teaching materials, which reinforces the former. Specifically textbooks and teacher training all use TI graphing calculators. Presumably tests are therefore made with the capabilities of a TI graphing calculator in mind.

CollegeBoard actually has a wide range of calculators it allows for the SAT (https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...), but very few test takers take advantage of this.

TI graphing calculators are based on sufficiently old hardware that it is probably faster to emulate a TI calculator on something with the power of a Raspberry Pi. Indeed an open source third party emulator already exists (https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu). Does anyone know what the legality of selling a calculator that is a dedicated emulator of a TI graphing calculator (not just an online one like Desmos, but a purpose-made physical calculator that does nothing else)? I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.

EDIT: I mean a dedicated emulator that can do nothing else but be a graphing calculator, e.g. not something on a smartphone.

>>dwohni+Ic
> I'm curious why this hasn't already been done before.

Probably for exactly the reason you're asking about: legality. There's no way that the licenses of the TI calculator software allow for this.

>>mdszy+ed
IANAL but it's unclear to me why that would be illegal. See Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. [ADDED: Basically said it was OK for Borland to sell a spreadsheet with the same look and feel as Lotus 1-2-3.] What probably is true is that the work-alike would likely not be certified to be used on exams unless some company spent the money to do so and then they're not really incentivized to sell the calculator for cheap.

The whole situation seems very path dependent. There's probably no particularly good reason why you even need a graphing calculator. It's just sort of become the default.

>>ghaff+he
The parent comment isn't about "same look and feel", they're talking about literally dumping the ROM from the TI calculator and running it on other hardware.

Could you sell a calculator, and say "hey this calculator has no software on it, but you can dump your TI ROM onto it and it'll run" kinda like how emulator software is handled on computers? Probably.

Can you just straight up rip the ROM and start selling that on an emulated calculator? Almost certainly not.

>>mdszy+Wm
Sort of. I'd imagine the hypothetical company would need to do a clean room reimplemention of the ROM rather than a straight rip since distribution of the ROM images is expressly forbidden in the TI license. That seems potentially hard, but not insurmountable, considering the relatively small size of the ROM. And then you get the rest through the emulator.

Although it'd be interesting if the calculator had a one-time flashing capability that allowed you to load an emulator once and then make it immutable and there was a way for schools to inspect what was loaded.

>>dwohni+7p
Writing an emulator and then having your users dump their own ROM from their legally-purchased calculator is totally fine.