Ndless

Ndless combines a resident program and utilities to open the TI-Nspire to third-party C and assembly development. Ndless is distributed under the Open Source Mozilla Public License.

The installation of Ndless on a TI-Nspire is required to be able to run assembly programs.

Find help for any Ndless related question or issue on Omnimaga's forum and the issue tracker.

Latest stable release: v2.0 (discuss). Computer-less installation compatible with OS 2.0 and 2.1.

Previous release (discontinued): v1.1.1. Requires OS 1.1, unfortunately not publicly available. Although advertised as compatible with Computer Link 1.4, you may have difficulties to install it depending on your computer configuration, and will prefer to use Computer Link 1.3.

Developing with Ndless

Tutorials and general information are available in the Development resources section.

Version upgrade

The executable format, the conventions and the header files are currently being defined and prone to change. This section describes the upgrade steps between the different releases of Ndless.

From v2.0 to v3.1

• Programs must be rebuilt to work on TI-Nspire CX because of several hardware changes. Programs with low-level accesses to hardware must also be slightly adapted: some hardware controllers have changed and their registers hare laid yout differently. The IO() macro can be used to select the address corresponding to the TI-Nspire model.
  • The LCD control register of the LCD controller has moved from C000001C to C0000018. Use IO_LCD_CONTROL instead.
  • The timer module has changed and has completely different registers
  • Programs are runned in grayscale mode. Use has_color and lcd_incolor() to switch to color mode. The screen buffer is in R5G6B5 mode.
• SYSCALL_CUSTOM(): the first parameter should now only contain OS v3.1 addresses.

From v1.7 to v2.0

• Touchpad key map support: rebuild your programs with the SDK of v2.0, which includes an updated isKeyPressed() function. Make sure that the programs do not depend on keys specific to the Clickpad.

From v1.1.x to v1.7

C and assembly programs:

• The syscall convention has changed, programs built with Ndless < v1.7 need to be rebuilt without any change to the code. This format should be compatible with the new OS versions once supported by Ndless, as long as backward compatibility can be kept.
• Custom syscalls should be defined using SYSCALL_CUSTOM (see above)
• The "PRG\0" signature before main() isn't required anymore, you can remove it
• MakeTNS doesn't exist anymore. You must objcopy directly to the .tns file in your Makefile.
• The program format is not specific to an hardware model anymore. You can now build your programs only once without defining NSPIRE_HARDWARE.
• OS v1.1 is not supported anymore. Check that your programs still work on OS v1.7.
• The program path is passed to the main function by following the C calling convention instead of using register r9

Assembly programs:

• The way to call syscalls has changed: replace 'oscall <os_function>' with 'syscall(<os_function>)'

From v1.0 to v1.1

C and assembly programs:

• Install the toolchain as described above. Your project doesn't need to follow the Ndless file tree anymore.
• Adapt your Makefile based on src/arm/Makefile or src/arm/demo/Makefile
• You may upgrade to the latest version of YAGARTO. Don't forget to delete any remaining *.o file before rebuilding a project.

Pure-assembly programs:

• Make sure that the file extensions is in uppercase (.S)
• Add the "main" symbol as described in the previous section
• You do not need to define the symbol "_start" anymore