{"id":22122732,"url":"https://github.com/timendus/vera","last_synced_at":"2025-10-18T05:55:12.159Z","repository":{"id":71825967,"uuid":"234377870","full_name":"Timendus/vera","owner":"Timendus","description":"A hobbyist Texas Instruments graphing calculator OS from the zeros","archived":false,"fork":false,"pushed_at":"2020-01-16T23:35:45.000Z","size":1055,"stargazers_count":2,"open_issues_count":0,"forks_count":0,"subscribers_count":3,"default_branch":"master","last_synced_at":"2025-01-29T12:47:52.824Z","etag":null,"topics":["os","ti-83","ti-83-plus","ti84","ti84plus","vera","z80"],"latest_commit_sha":null,"homepage":"","language":"Assembly","has_issues":true,"has_wiki":null,"has_pages":null,"mirror_url":null,"source_name":null,"license":null,"status":null,"scm":"git","pull_requests_enabled":true,"icon_url":"https://github.com/Timendus.png","metadata":{"files":{"readme":"README.md","changelog":null,"contributing":null,"funding":null,"license":null,"code_of_conduct":null,"threat_model":null,"audit":null,"citation":null,"codeowners":null,"security":null,"support":null,"governance":null,"roadmap":null,"authors":null,"dei":null,"publiccode":null,"codemeta":null}},"created_at":"2020-01-16T17:48:19.000Z","updated_at":"2022-06-15T22:15:17.000Z","dependencies_parsed_at":null,"dependency_job_id":"c89d4740-e734-4fdc-b4ee-91a5b0cd9f24","html_url":"https://github.com/Timendus/vera","commit_stats":null,"previous_names":[],"tags_count":0,"template":false,"template_full_name":null,"repository_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/Timendus%2Fvera","tags_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/Timendus%2Fvera/tags","releases_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/Timendus%2Fvera/releases","manifests_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/Timendus%2Fvera/manifests","owner_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners/Timendus","download_url":"https://codeload.github.com/Timendus/vera/tar.gz/refs/heads/master","host":{"name":"GitHub","url":"https://github.com","kind":"github","repositories_count":245226338,"owners_count":20580701,"icon_url":"https://github.com/github.png","version":null,"created_at":"2022-05-30T11:31:42.601Z","updated_at":"2022-07-04T15:15:14.044Z","host_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub","repositories_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories","repository_names_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repository_names","owners_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners"}},"keywords":["os","ti-83","ti-83-plus","ti84","ti84plus","vera","z80"],"created_at":"2024-12-01T15:27:31.877Z","updated_at":"2025-10-18T05:55:12.130Z","avatar_url":"https://github.com/Timendus.png","language":"Assembly","funding_links":[],"categories":[],"sub_categories":[],"readme":"# Vera - the Calc Lover's OS\n\nThis repository is an attempt to collect the brave repeated undertakings of\nseveral people from the TI graphing calculator scene to build their own\noperating system for the calculator from scratch. This project became known as\n\"Vera\". To my knowledge, three separate but loosely related attempts have been\nmade that resulted in actual code.\n\nMy role in the first two attempts was limited (I remember I came up with the\nname Vera, which is nice). The third attempt was my own pet project.\n\n## Contributing\n\nIf you have more files or links or know more about this than I do, please send\nyour pull requests my way 😄\n\n## Generation 1 _(early 2006)_\n\n![Screenshot of Vera generation 1](Generation%201/Vera.0.0.2/veraCLI.gif)\n\nThere are two releases of this version, 0.0.1 (5 February 2006) and 0.0.2 (28\napril 2006), as part of the \"Pre Alpha\" release. It actually still has a working\nwebsite on sourceforge: http://vera.sourceforge.net/.\n\nThe central figure in this effort was probably Brazucs from the UnitedTI\nforums. Also, it references `Jim's stuff :)` in the comments [at some point](Generation%201/Vera.0.0.2/p1.asm#L297).\nThat's undoubtedly \"Jim e\" from the forums.\n\nThe code is pretty small and has a singular purpose, but I think the real\nachievement lies in being able to generate a ROM file from scratch that boots\non a calculator and then does anything without being able to depend on the\noriginal OS's subroutines, like outputting some text and getting some input.\n\n## Generation 2 _(late 2006, early 2007)_\n\nAgain, I've forgotten who put this together. But we have some actual\n[documentation](Generation%202/Documentation) this time, which mentions a couple\nof people by name:\n\n```\nthis file contains the names of the people who wrote code for Vera or whose code was stolen for Vera:\n-Jim e ...\n-Timendus ...\n-flopus maximus, Benjamin Moody\n-Jacobbus, Jacob van Ginkel\n-and of course all the other people form UnitedTI\nmaybe I forget some add them please\n\nsources where we ripped most of the code from:\n-the API\n-Pong OS\n-wiki ti\n-and more\n```\n\nI see my nickname there, although I can't seem to remember actively contributing\ncode to this project. So that's probably just because they ripped \"the API\",\nwhich was a project of mine that I added lots of routines to (it was an online\nroutines repository, the contemporary equivalent of which would be something\nlike npm).\n\nThe [ROM file](Generation%202/Source/Vera%2083%2B.rom) doesn't seem to do very\nmuch or to be very stable, unfortunately. But still, it manages to boot the\ncalculator and respond to keypresses, which is already quite impressive.\n\nThese's also lots of [code](Generation%202/Source). Clearly the author(s) tried\nto provide a more generic API as an abstraction of the hardware for programmers.\n\n## Generation 3 _(late 2007)_\n\n![Screenshot of Vera generation 3](Generation%203/dist/vera.gif)\n\nThis project was announced and discussed here:\nhttp://maxcoderz.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3\u0026t=2524 (which unfortunately gives a\n403 forbidden as of 2025)\n\nThis is the version of Vera I started. The original plan was to write it in C\nusing [sdcc](http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/), but a lack of experience with that\n(or rather: the abundance of experience in writing 'pure' z80) in the community\nmade quick work of those plans.\n\nBeing in university and studying computer science, I started this project with\ndocumentation and testing in mind. So a tool was written (taking ideas from\nJavaDoc) to generate HTML documentation from comments in the assembly source\nfiles. The tool (although pretty crappy) has survived and [can be found\nhere](Generation%203/asmdoc%20tool). Also, we have two versions of the generated\ndocumentation website, that can be seen in the [docs\ndirectory](Generation%203/docs). The latest version can also be [browsed through\nonline](http://vps.timendus.com/vera/asmdoc/). Several interactive \"tests\" had\nbeen implemented in the ROM file, but there was also a pretty serious effort\nunder way of writing a suite of automated tests. How very rigorous of young me\n😄\n\nWe have a working [ROM file](Generation%203/dist/Vera.rom) for this generation.\nThe above screenshot shows off all of its features 🥳\n\nThe actual Vera source was a different story though. The code was hosted in an\nSVN repository that was on my private server. The server was long gone, and it\ntook me a very long time to recover the source. In 2020 when I created this\nrepository on Github, the only file I could find was [one that I\ncopy-pasted](Generation%203/repository/src/devices/memory.asm) on the Maxcoderz\nforum, and was able to retrieve there. In 2022 I recovered a bunch of files from\na broken old external harddrive, but most of the directory structure was gone\nand I assumed I would not find anything but loose and broken files here, so I\nkept on looking in other places every once in a while. It took me until 2025\nbefore I returned to the recovered disk and was able to locate at least some\nversion of the [original repository](Generation%203/repository) that, to my\nsurprise, seemed fully intact.\n\nI'm not sure how recent this version is, but it does seem to have the routines\nmentioned in the documentation sites and its [tests\nmenu](Generation%203/repository/src/tests.asm) shows more information than the\nROM that we already had. So I feel confident that this is a very recent version.\n\nThere also used to be a wiki with all kinds of info on it. I think I have found\na MySQL database dump that should contain that information, but it also contains\na lot of other information so I'm not publishing that. I may one day try to\ngenerate a version of what the wiki looked like from it. What is still readily\navailable is the [Google group or mailing\nlist](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/calc-lovers) with lots of\ninteresting bits of information.\n\nIf only we would have had Github back in those days 🙈.\n","project_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Ftimendus%2Fvera","html_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/projects/github.com%2Ftimendus%2Fvera","lists_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Ftimendus%2Fvera/lists"}