Though, I think the fact you can emulate an entire gaming system on it will make it harder for students to adopt it in the classroom. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of how schools look at devices such as this?
Our teachers were just as intrigued and excited as we are when they saw games running on the calculator for the first time, and from then on just told students off for getting sidetracked by Super Mario on a case by case basis.
But it is indeed very powerful hardware for a calculator. And the best part about it is that it's still powered by 4 AAA batteries, and lasts for quite a long time - much longer than newer calculators that are more like locked-up smartphones in design, and have similar battery life.
I see the site is still up, 20 years later: https://ticalc.org/
https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon/issues/327
In theory, it is possible to replace the entire OS, and some people have tried rolling their own from scratch, but I don't recall any of those projects getting past the prototype stage. I do wonder if some kind of basic Unix-like is possible given the hardware constraints - 58 MHz CPU and 2 MiB RAM is not much, but there were historical Unix machines with far less. However, if one were to do a port rather than writing it from scratch, what would be the best thing to base it on? Minix?
For the curious, here's the community wiki that documents the platform: https://prizm.cemetech.net/Prizm_Programming_Portal/
