The About Screen of MirageOS can be reached by pressing the STAT
key when running the Program Manager, and it is a replica of the
Title screen that you first saw at the initial start-up of the
shell. This About Screen was provided for users to see the creative
desert scene we have made, yet didn't want to show at every time
the user started the shell, or that may become annoying to users.
The About Screen also serves the purpose of giving the user more
information than the Title Screen did, which just showed the name
of our software company, Detached Solutions. On the About Screen,
four sessions of text are displayed for a short period of time,
and then will return to the Program Manager. The user can also
press any key during this time to quickly return to the Program
Manager, and not have to watch all the text be displayed. The
four different frames of the About Screen are shown here:
The second frame gives notice to our webpage address, so that users
who received the FlashApp from another TI-83 Plus may know where
they can find more info about our shell and come here. The third
frame says "System Coding: By Dan Englender", who is one of the
two main developers of MirageOS. System coding refers too all the
Internal workings of the shell that you can not visably see, such
as Program Execution, AppVar Management, Emulation, Organizing the
built-in routines for developers, and creating all the Base code
which the interfaces run upon and use functions from. The fourth
frame of the About Screen says "Interfacing: By Jason Kovacs", who
is the other main developer of MirageOS, and Interfacing refers to
all of the external things that you can see. He developed the design
and workings of the Program Manager, Function Bar, Options Screens,
External GUIs (except for the Command Prompt made by Dan), the Title
graphic and other graphics, etc. Neither Dan nor Jason could have
created this Flash Application shell alone, and both needed the
talents of eachother to make MirageOS happen.
| MirageOS
Credits :
Credit Information |
|
MirageOS could not have become a reality by just the programming
talents of Dan Englender and Jason Kovacs alone, it had various
contributions from other people who may not have directly added
to the shell, but who have certainly made an impact on its
completion and release. We would like to give credit to these
people and list them here, noting the things they helped with
in allowing MirageOS to come to a close and be successful
in its initial release to the public. In this section of our
webpage we will also thank the people who have had past
influence upon the developers, which allowed them to create such
an innovation Flash Application shell.
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Andrew Magness - Andrew has been with us every step of
the way during the development of MirageOS, working along side
of us (Dan and Jason) in the TCPA, and on the TI-83 Plus SDK
Beta team. He became a FlashApp developer, gaining a developer's
certificate, which allows the testing of Applications on your
calculator before they are signed by Texas Instruments. Andrew
has been one of our biggest Beta testers of the shell, pointing
out problems, offering suggestions on what to improve, and
keeping us entertained with his Fire-Fighting stories as we
progressed on the shell through the months. ;) He contributed
a great amount with the MirageOS Ports that were released with
the shell initially, and he contributed greatly to the existence
of our software company and the Detached Solutions webpage.
Scott Dial - Scott has been helping us by writing a couple
routines that we needed. He wrote part of the scrolling for the
interfaces, and the routine to swap two vat entries, which is a
key part of the sorting routines. All this, and he doesn't even
own a TI-83 Plus to test it on. Without his help, developing
MirageOS would have taken much longer.
Beta Testers - Everybody makes mistakes when developing
software, and we made plenty of them. Our beta testers helped us
find these mistakes before the final release, so we could have a
bug free program. If there are any bugs in MirageOS, complain to
the beta testers ;) The beta testers also helped us by porting
and writing programs for MirageOS, to test out our library
routines. Beta testers included: Andrew Magness, Scott Dial,
Brandon Engleberth, Sean Reed, and Erik Davidson. Beta testers for version 1.2 included: Andy Janata, Patrick Poon, Jason Malinowski, Martin Warmer, Thomas Stagner, and other users on the Detached Solutions forum. Beta testers for version 1.3 included: Lyndon Zhang, James Robertson, Rodes Brown, Mike Knoop, Sang-June Kim, Brant Barrett, Martin Warmer, and other users on the Detached Solutions forum.
David Phillips - David wrote the Run-Length Encoding (RLE)
Decompression routine that we use in MirageOS and have made
available for programmer access. This routine is very useful, and
very optimized, and we thank David for creating it and letting
us use it.
Joe Wingbermuehle - Joe led the way in TI-83 Plus shells
with his ION shell. Without ION, there probably wouldn't be MirageOS.
Additionally, Joe let us use his ION library routines in MirageOS so
that we can run ION programs.
Texas Instruments - Texas Instruments has been an enormous
help to us on this project. They allowed us to Beta test the SDK,
and have been very helpful in getting us information that we needed
to complete MirageOS.
Sam Heald - Sam helped us quite a bit with his vast TI-82
knowledge. His information about TI-82 rom calls helped us fix parts
of the emulation core. He has also allowed our staff to port his
existing TI-82 and TI-83 programs to MirageOS format.
|
Very much thanks to all these people and groups for your influence
upon MirageOS in the past and during its development. We couldn't
have done it without you... Thanks to all of the TI-83 Plus users
out there as well, who have and hopefully will continue to support
our shell in the future to make it a great success. :)
| MirageOS History :
Version History |
|
Version 1.3
- Supports compressed programs (Lite8x compression)
- Fixes display problems on some new TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus calculators
- BASIC program errors and memory errors are reported in function bar
- Left key closes current folder
- Fixed rename program bugs
- Fixed hide program bugs
- Program manager updates
Version 1.2
- BASIC programs now compatible with all hardware/operating-system combinations
- Fixed bugs specific to TI-84 Plus calculator
- Much faster sorting
- Smart writeback only writes to archive when necessary
- Archived programs are not deleted if they crash
- 82 Emulation removed
- Some functions run at 15 mhz on capable calculators
- Free archive display now large enough to display SE memory size
- Folder size can be larger than 65535 bytes
- Added ability to cancel rename/new folder prompts
- New tasker hotkey to quit immediately without writeback
- A variety of minor and cosmetic changes
- Web address now points to the right place
Version 1.1
- Unarchive and rearchive work correctly under low RAM conditions
- Sort works correctly with two programs with same name
- All sorts other than by name have been removed
- Improved 82 compatibility
- Fixed key hook bugs (graph screen problems)
- Alpha, instead of on key, toggles alpha/numeric mode in text input
- More shortcut keys in program manager
- Fixed bugs with hidden programs
- Fixed some BASIC program bugs
- Fixed Alpha+on bug
- Added Hide All function
