TilEm on MacOS

TilEm is a Linux emulator for certain TI graphing calculators including the TI-83 and TI-84 series. This is more or less how I got TilEm 0.973 running on my Snow Leopard MacOS system. For TilEm 2.0 visit this page. I'm no expert; suggestions welcome. These instructions may be out of date.

  1. Install MacPorts.
  2. Using MacPorts, install gtk2
    sudo port install gtk2
    
  3. Download TilEm.
  4. Unzip and build it:
    tar xvfz tilem-0.973.tar.gz
    cd tilem-0.973
    ./configure
    make
    
    • Lenore Horner reports, I had tilp2 installed under MacPorts and I had to deactivate libti* except libticables to get make to work for tilem. I've never used tilp2 so I don't know what the conflict is or whether there's another workaround.
  5. TilEm really just emulates the calculator hardware; it depends on an actual TI calculator ROM to act like a calculator. Here's one way to get one:
    1. Download the TI-83 Plus SDK.
    2. Download and install wine. MacPorts has a wine port but at this writing (now years old) it does not work with Snow Leopard so instead I used this handbuilt and hand-tweaked version.
      This is how you would install under MacPorts:
      sudo port install wine
        
    3. Using wine, open the downloaded SDK (named 83psdk_setup.exe). This should open the Windows installer; when it asks where to install, make sure it goes to a Mac directory, not a native Windows directory. (Of course, instead of using wine, you could also install the SDK on a Windows VM (e.g. Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox) or an actual Windows machine and just copy the ROMs over to the Mac.)
    4. Copy the .clc files from where they got installed to where the tilem binary lives:
      cp sdkdir/Exe/*.clc tilemdir/bin
        
  6. Start X-Windows
  7. Start tilem from within the tilemdir/bin directory:
    ./tilem
    
    This seems to copy the ROMs to a standard place: ~/.TilEm/ti83p. (If you see the TilEm logo on the screen, you have to turn the calculator on before it works!)
  8. If it works, install it:
    sudo make install
    
  9. Run it from a command window with the command tilem. Make sure X11 is running first.

Extra credit tweak: White background instead of gray

TilEm tries a bit too hard to emulate the thing accurately. One thing I don't like is the gray screen, especially if I want screen shots for printing. So I modified tilemdir/src/tilem/gui/screen.c this way:

308,309c308,309
< = (0xbd * i) / (NGRAYS - 1);
< iris[NGRAYS*3 - i - 1] = (0xb5 * i) / (NGRAYS - 1);
---
>   = (0xff/*bd*/ * i) / (NGRAYS - 1);
>   iris[NGRAYS*3 - i - 1] = (0xff/*b5*/ * i) / (NGRAYS - 1);

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