Building Flash Apps with TI Flash Studio and Sierra 68k C Compiler

This repository is a guide on how to set up the TI Flash Studio build tools, with or without the IDE, and how to get started building FlashApps for TI 68k calculators (TI-89 (Titanium), TI-92 Plus and TI Voyage 200).

Overview

The TI Flash Studio IDE itself requires the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, which is not supported by Microsoft anymore. You can however still use it, even on Windows 7 and Windows 10. The installation is described in the "IDE with build tools" section.

Note: A previous version of this guide stated that the Microsoft Java VM is only compatible with Windows XP. This is actually not the case. I recently tried to install the Microsoft Java VM on a Windows 7 and a Windows 10 PC and to my surprise it worked (there were some warning messages on Windows 7, but I just ignored them).

However all the underlying build tools (compiler, assembler, linker, ...) don't depend on the Microsoft Java VM, and can be installed without the IDE. This is described in the "Build tools (compiler, ...) without IDE" section.

It is also possible to run the build on a continuous integration service (AppVeyor in the example). This is the easiest way if you want to get started with minimal effort. The setup is described in the "AppVeyor build" section.

I only own a TI Voyage 200, so the exact instructions in this guide are written for the TI V200 and the TI-92, but with some small adaptions (target specific compiler flags, ...) they will of course also work for the TI-89.

Feel free to send me an email (daniel_eisele@gmx.de) if you have any questions.

Files and checksums

These are all the files used in this document. There are two versions of TI Flash Studio, a newer version (FlashStudio1.1.43.exe) and an older version (TIFlashStudio.exe/fsinst_1.1.34.exe). I use the newer version, but I don't think that it has any relevant benefits over the older one.

The two PDF files are very important, you won't get very far without them...

So if can't get any of the files, then please contact me (daniel_eisele@gmx.de). Also if you want to host these files (I don't want to do it for legal reasons), please let me know.

File name	SHA256 checksum
FlashStudio1.1.43.exe	7852ADD8B12BB1E138F7F3C1E8FB1AF127CEA00F1D0A15D1F4583FB96216DEC0
TIFlashStudio.exe (also called fsinst_1.1.34.exe)	93DE72CD174A947A351790EBF240FD0444C27F129CE35BF5B7E8DE54E42331B9
msjavx86.exe	03E38318FA34AD2AEFF00517AE6D72E05588509E1C549D9147029483D08CF2B5
e_wise.arj	A2FC915847EE397A7B28C346B50852EE3BB477B5AEC41384DD47742220B2A0DD
sdk8992pguide.pdf	5ECE362291188E03025291B1421A1B62E9FD28609907C12F793DC158DCEFC19F
sdk8992pcompiler.pdf	51B842428C8D76A243F2C6A0510349737B2ABA0ECF815E166E9368E650CC7D9C

IDE with build tools

Before installing TI Flash Studio you first have to install the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (msjavx86.exe).

After that you can run the TI Flash Studio installer (FlashStudio1.1.43.exe or fsinst_1.1.34.exe). I personally use the newer one (FlashStudio1.1.43.exe), but I don't think that the new version has any relevant benefits, so it shouldn't matter which one you use.

After the installation is finished add the directory "C:\<programs>\<shared files>\TI Shared\TI Flash Studio" to your PATH variable to get some debugger features working. Replace <programs> and <Shared Files> with the actual folder names.

To be able to later use your FlashApps on a real calculator, they must be signed with a cryptographic key. To achieve that, you have to replace the content of the default key file (sdk-92p.key, located in the program folder of TI Flash Studio) with the new key.

The TI-92 Plus Flash application key looks like this:

0101
406104CDFAD955D41F1ECCB9B622007FE8BC75E8B28DA178334755FEF27C564D47B04FD82498C163B762991C68CF64E29236BC41A4C1BCB9793B6EE965407C74BC
40E17C4AA4C942CC57282E9B911E7B39352A2D8D4EC15398366C971FF7D2D92FB18D35D60A78C086CCE0F08F0F4CC36F676A4604E529DD72C95C11AED2F48D6D37

For more information on the TI keys and how TI Flash Studio stores them take a look at the "Keys" section at the end of this document.

As the default project template is buggy an messed up, replace it with the new one from this repository. You can find the default template folder in the program folder of TI Flash Studio.

When you've got everything set up, launch TI Flash Studio, click "File -> New Project.." and select "TI-92 Plus - Flash Application" (select this for both TI-92 Plus and TI Voyage 200 Flash Apps). After that click the "Build" button in the toolbar. Once the build is finished you can click the "View Simulator" button and try out the new FlashApp in the simulator.

By default TI Flash Studio will produce debug builds. You can change this by selecting "Project -> Build Configuration -> Release". The resulting binary which you can finally send to your real calculator is the *.9xk file located in the folder "sdk-92p" in your project folder.

If you get strange errors related to file names or see file names with some part of the ending cut off, then you have to reduce the file name length. This can be done by using the 8.3 file/directory names, which is the default when you open the .fsp project file directly from the explorer. More info about 8.3 file names here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename

Build tools (compiler, ...) without IDE

To install the build tools, they first need to be extracted from the installer. The TI Flash Studio installer is a WISE installer, so we can use the tool E_WISE to unpack it.

Once you've extracted the build tools there's only one problem left: the resource compiler (rc32.exe) returns with the exit code -65536, even if the compilation was successful. If you don't care about the exit code then this isn't a problem, but most build systems (make, ...) will abort the build if a command returns a non-zero exit code. Luckily this can be prevented by patching a single byte in rc32.exe. Replace the byte hex 66 at offset hex 11C1 with the byte hex 90. hex 66 is an x86 instruction prefix which switches a command from 32 bit to 16 bit. The command in question is XOR EAX EAX which should set the return value in the EAX register to zero, but because of the instruction prefix only the lower 16 bits of the EAX register are cleared, while the upper 16 bits stay at hex FFFF. So the solution for this problem is to just replace the instruction prefix with a nop instruction (hex 90).

The following list contains the steps needed to set up the build tools:

1. extract the archive e_wise.arj (for example with 7zip)
2. run E_WISE_W.EXE FlashStudio1.1.43.exe FlashStudio to extract all the files from FlashStudio1.1.43.exe
3. run 00000000.BAT in the generated folder, this gives the extracted files their correct names
4. copy the contents of the extracted SIERRALOC folder to "C:\sierra" (destination can be any folder you like, in this example and in the AppVeyor script I use "C:\sierra\")
5. copy the extracted TI68kTool.dll (from the MAINDIR folder) to "C:\sierra\bin\"
6. replace the byte hex 66 at offset hex 11C1 in the file "C:\sierra\bin\rc32.exe" with hex 90
7. create the folder "C:\sierra\keys\"
8. create the file "C:\sierra\keys\sdk-92p.key" with this content (more information on this is in the section "Keys" at the end of the document):

   0101
   406104CDFAD955D41F1ECCB9B622007FE8BC75E8B28DA178334755FEF27C564D47B04FD82498C163B762991C68CF64E29236BC41A4C1BCB9793B6EE965407C74BC
   40E17C4AA4C942CC57282E9B911E7B39352A2D8D4EC15398366C971FF7D2D92FB18D35D60A78C086CCE0F08F0F4CC36F676A4604E529DD72C95C11AED2F48D6D37
   

After you've finished the previous steps you can start compiling your FlashApps with the following steps (with the specific CMD commands you can build the temperature converter example project in this repository):

1. cd into the project directory (cd temperature_converter_example)
2. run the preprocessor on the resource file (C:\sierra\bin\com68.exe -E -Q -I.\ -I C:\sierra\include interface.r interface.i)
3. run the resource compiler (C:\sierra\bin\rc32.exe -mn interface.r)
4. run the C compiler (C:\sierra\bin\com68.exe -D_92 -q -Q -l -Oc1f0l3m1p1r2x1 -Xbef3IL -I C:\sierra\include temperature_converter.c temperature_converter.s_)
5. run the F line call optimizer (C:\sierra\bin\fline.exe temperature_converter.s_ temperature_converter.s)
6. run the assembler..
   1. ...on the F line optimized compiler output (C:\sierra\bin\asm68.exe -Q temperature_converter.s -o temperature_converter.o)
   2. ...on the resource compiler output (C:\sierra\bin\asm68.exe -Q interface.s -o interface.o)
7. run the linker to link all object files (C:\sierra\bin\link68.exe -Q -r -L"C:\sierra\lib" -o temperature_converter.out temperature_converter.o interface.o -lams SECTIONS{GROUP:{.text:{}.const:{}.data:{}.bss:{}}})
8. run sdkpc.exe to sign and generate the final *.9xk file, the last parameter is the internal application name which may not be longer than 8 characters (C:\sierra\bin\sdkpc.exe -O3 -s C:\sierra\keys\sdk-92p.key 92 temperature_converter.out TempConv)

After the build completed successfully you will get the *.9xk file which you can send to your calculator.

If you've tried this with Wine on Linux, please let me know if it worked, so I can add this information to this file. It should probably work, but I haven't tried it so far.

AppVeyor build

To demonstrate that the extracted and patched build tools work, I have set up continous integration / cloud build on this repository. To do that I basically turned the previous section into a small script (appveyor.yml), which sets up the compiler and build the project on the AppVeyor cloud infrastructure.

The AppVeyor CMD script isn't really pretty but... mmh... but... at least it works. The code which patches the binary is especially ugly because Windows doesn't have a built in patch command. Patching is currently done by splicing rc32.exe with 7zip into several parts, replacing one part and stitching them back together afterwards.

So if you want to build FlashApps with minmal effort, just fork this GitHub repository, setup AppVeyor with your GitHub account and the example project (a temperature unit converter) will be built on the AppVeyor servers. The compiled binary (the *.9xk file) will be exported as an AppVeyor artifact, which you can download on the AppVeyor web interface. Once everything works you can modify the source code and create your own FlashApp.

As you can see here, you can also add a nice badge to your repository, which indicates the build status of your project:

SDK Documentation

The documentation for the 68k calculator SDK is split up into two files:

• sdk8992pguide.pdf (developer guide for TIOS)
• sdk8992pcompiler.pdf (compiler manual)

The documentation is relativly good overall and contains almost everything a developer needs to know about TIOS, but I also noticed a few small flaws. For example some of the code samples are a bit sloppy (bad PRNG code, ...), so don't just blindly copy something.

Tips for developing FlashApps

• look at other open source FlashApps to see how they're done, for example:
  • Command Post Plus
  • Blocks on the Rocks
• use Command Post Plus to test your FlashApp for memory leaks or to see how your FlashApp behaves in low memory situations etc.
• always test on a simulator (for example TiEmu), otherwise you could crash your calculator and lose all your files or if you have a memory leak, you would only be able to get your leaked memory back by resetting your calculator
• references to local variables cost much less memory than references to global variables, so if you often have to access global variables it's more memory efficient to access them via a local pointer

Keys

To be able to later use your FlashApps on a real calculator, they must be signed with a cryptographic key from TI. As all TI keys are cracked, you can sign the FlashApp yourself. You can get the keys here: https://brandonw.net/calculators/keys/

The default key of TI Flash Studio is stored in the file sdk-92p.key which is located in the program folder of TI Flash Studio.

The first line in the key file is the key id.

The second line is value n of the key (bytes in reverse order) with a 40 in front of it.

The third line is value d of the key (bytes in reverse order) with a 40 in front of it.

For the TI-92 Plus Flash application signing key the file looks like this:

0101
406104CDFAD955D41F1ECCB9B622007FE8BC75E8B28DA178334755FEF27C564D47B04FD82498C163B762991C68CF64E29236BC41A4C1BCB9793B6EE965407C74BC
40E17C4AA4C942CC57282E9B911E7B39352A2D8D4EC15398366C971FF7D2D92FB18D35D60A78C086CCE0F08F0F4CC36F676A4604E529DD72C95C11AED2F48D6D37

I haven't fully tested key compatibility between calculator models yet, but the TI-92 key also works for the TI Voyage 200.