The HackPhrase concept was born one evening while a couple dozen of us friends sat around and played the electronic version of Catch Phrase. With the skill sets of those in the group (mechanical engineers, electronics experts, software engineers, etc…), it didn’t take long before we started to contemplate what it would take to hack the game to add our own wordlists. I mean, how hard can it be, right?

As it turns out, not very. The toughest challenge I faced was getting the larger LCD shoehorned in the case. Though the viewable area of the LCD is nearly a perfect fit for the standard opening in the case, the depth (a little over 0.5″) is what caused the problem.

The buttons from the original game (rubber nubs over the top of conductive pads) can be reused. All that is required is to carefully cut them off of the original board and solder to the traces. I’ve found that these buttons give the best feel and tend to be very reliable in this application.

For the power button, a Polulu push button power switch was used and mounted in the factory reset button location on the back. Though the unit can be powered down via a timeout function on the Arduino, it does require something roughly the size of the tip of a ball-point pen (or paper-clip) to turn it on.

Now for the bread ‘n’ butter… the software. The whole goal of this project was to be able to customize the wordlists. The way that the game is currently setup is to read all .txt files from an SD card. The file name is the category, and the contents of the file is simply words/phrases separated by a carriage return. A game config file was also added for quickly adjusting game parameters such as turn length, shutdown timeout length, max team score, etc…

One other challenge was the wordlists. The contents of the factory wordlists are not published and so you have a few options here… You can either try to grind the resin off of the original chip with a dremel tool and reverse engineer the contents of the chip, manually click through the word lists in the game and write them down or, say the heck with the original words and create your own. I opted for option #2 as well as scrounged through many game clones (for mobile phones) and compiled my own.

Gotcha’s:

• The LiPoly charger has 2 status LED’s mounted to the front-side. Power and status. The power LED stays lit when the battery is connected, but the charger is not connected to a power source. I chose to carefully remove it from the board to reduce the power drain while the unit was off.
• With the chosen components, the large female USB plug needed to be removed from the Arduino Mega in order to allow room for the battery and LCD.
• The LCD board required some slight modification in order to get the team buttons to fit properly. It’s a VERY close fit.
• The battery is ever so slightly underpowered. Ideally, I would like to find a 1500 mAh or even a 2000 mAh battery in the same form factor. The battery life is great, but the refresh on the LCD could be better (though it’s not very noticeable).
• The original speaker’s impedance is a little on the high side (~30 ohms). That makes it a little quite once the volume level of the room starts to rise. I’m currently on the hunt for another one with the same form factor, but closer to 8 ohms.
• There is a piece of scrap breadboard glued to the top of the SD card socket. There was a slight gap that the SD card could be inserted through and get lost inside of the unit.

The parts list:

More pictures:

Changes:
- Bug-fixes
- Added search function (You may need to edit your toolbar for it to show up)
- Better recognition of when to update the window

Screenshot
Download FlashTracerX

I’m still not at the point where I’m ready to release the code for the emulation framework yet, but it’s getting close. I need to finish documenting all of the classes and make a few more optimizations. It will come! I promise! In the meantime I’ve included the compiled SWC (EmuLib.swc) for it so that you can download the source and build the project.

You can get the source by visiting the TI8XEmu Project, right-clicking and selecting “View Source”.

Changes:
- UI Tweaks
- Added “Always On Top” capability
- Autoscroll and Always On Top selections are saved between sessions

Screenshot
Download FlashTracerX

Included is a Readme and a sample mm.cfg file. Read them, seriously, because I won’t be providing any support. If you need any help beyond what’s outlined in those files, do a Google search for FlashTracer (the Firefox plug-in requires the same basic setup).

Happy coding!

NOTE: This version of FlashTracerX is not compatible with OS X 10.6. I’ll try to get around to updating it once I have some free time.

Screenshot
Download FlashTracerX

• Better event dispatching
• Added an optional sizing constraint ratio called ’sizeRatio’ to ensure that the panel stays at a certain width and height ratio when resizing.
• Misc. bug-fixes and refactoring.

SuperPanelDemo

I tried to keep it as simple and customizable as possible. Each of the close, minimize and maximize buttons can be completely and independently skinned. All other styling for the Panel component can be applied. Even move and resize effects can be applied without messing up the state (minimize/maximize) transitions.

It’s still a work in progress, but solid enough for daily use. Enjoy!

SuperPanelDemo

Update 2/3/09: Fixed the Minimize -> Maximize -> Restore maximize issue outlined in David’s comment. Thanks for the suggestions, David!

Update 2/4/09: Added ability to apply ‘inactive styling’ when the panel is not in front.

It’s an emulator for the TI-8X series graphing calculators from Texas Instruments written completely in ActionScript 3. Currently the emulator supports the TI-82, TI-83 and TI-85 with TI-73 and TI-86 coming soon. (TI-89 support is planned, but will not happen any time in the near future as it uses a completely different CPU)

In order to run it you will need your own ROM image from an actual calculator that you wish to emulate. Information on dumping the ROM from your calculator can be found here. Because of the copyright on the ROM image I cannot post one here. (Although I do not condone such practice, if you’re resourceful enough to, say, do a Google search for such an item and, oh, I don’t know, click on the first link, you’ll probably have very few problems rounding one up.) Sorry, guys. I wish there was a way around this one.

Simply select the desired machine from the combo box in the upper-right corner, upload your ROM image and away you go.

I will be posting the entire source for this project in the weeks to come so stay tuned! Also, an Air version will be coming along shortly.

A special thanks goes out to Alan Fischer over at Lightning Toads for his technical insight!

So without further ado: TI8XEmu Project
Screenshots: #1, #2, #3, #4

If your ROM isn’t currently supported for one of the calculator types already in the app, please send an email to: tranceguy [at-symbol] mchsi [dot] com with the MD5 signature of the particular ROM, the version number and the calculator that it’s for and I’ll post a test version of the emulator so that you can try out your ROM. I’d appreciate a “Hey, it works!” or “No such luck.” so that I know whether to roll the changes into the main app.

Note: Certain versions of ROMs (particularly older ones than the emulator was written for) will simply not work in the app in its current state but may be available down the road. Also, ‘Plus’ and ‘Silver’ variations of any of the machines are not currently supported, but I do plan on adding support for them in the future.

This project is 100% for the community, so any feedback you guys can provide, the more successful a project it ends up being for you, me and others.

Update 12/28/08: Added support for several more ROM versions for the TI-82 and TI-83. Thanks, Xavier!