Eact Maker - Online eActivity Generator

[gbl08ma Profile Website]

Each strip has it's own Main Memory which has a maximum size of about 30 KB (because of eAct file size restrictions). How much a strip uses the Main Memory, it's the "strip size". That Main Memory is separate from the calculator's main one. I believe the Notes strip may be a special case.

It'd be good if Simon could take a look at how strips work, specially into where the memory goes when we switch between the strip and eAct (fake multitasking). It has bugged me for months (I eventually got my add-ins to have a strip, and I can say that in order to support switching between eAct and your running add-in-as-strip is as easy as using GetKey). Add-ins running in strips have as much stack memory available (512 KB) as if they were running as a simple add-in. Assuming that the contents of the eAct program are kept in RAM during strip switching, and assuming they take as much RAM as the add-in (512 KB), we'd need 1 MB of RAM just to be able to have a strip open.
The other possibility is that when one switches between a strip and eAct, the OS is saving the RAM of the previous task in flash, and restoring it when we get back to it... but with flash being so slow, I don't think this is what happens.

[helder7]

Was released a new version today, with support for more calculators/formats.

Changelog:
-Was added support for the classpad formats .xcp and .fls
All classpad models (including the new fx-cp400) are now supported by EactMaker.
Note that the math/latex support for Classpad was not yet implemented, since it is done in a different way than g*e. Only the common special characters and note strip function are available for now.
Maybe a redesign of the classpad table of special characters makes sense in a possible future update because for example the number of subscript characters in classpad is much smaller than in fx9860g/Prizm.

-Was added support for Casio AFX, CFX and other retro calculators that use the .cat format.
Cat is a basic program, based in text converter concept, with some modifications, not an e-activity, so there are no support for commands like note, etc... However, it is possible to use some special characters...after some tests, was created a table with the supported special characters to use in generator. Since there are no accented characters, a function to replace accented characters by non-accented was also implemented as well as a filter to remove non allowed characters that could be typed by mistake from other formats.

[AmazoNKA Profile]

I've been looking at the color functions (Marker and Char).
It is possible to use markers not allowed in the editor of the calculator. See the example below:



Do not know if it will be easy or not we put this function in generator. This function will also change (increase) the file size in header, etc...

Anyway, the way how the color work is almost known:

In files, hex of colors appear at the end of the line (that uses colors) after the text and the align bytes. Layout:

Text|Align bytes|1byte per character to set the color

Each byte (hex) used to set the color of a character, is constituted by two digits:

1º - Marker color number
2º - Character color number

And the color codes:

Black - 0
Blue - 1
Red - 4
Magenta - 5
Green - 2
Cyan - 3
Yellow - 6
White - 7

Now a practical example. Text (with marker red and characters blue):

Text | ??? Align Bytes ???|Color codes (including align)
64 65 6D 6F | 00 00 00 00 | 41 41 41 41 70 70 70 70

Suggested Latex code for editor:
\color{a}{b}{c}
where
a = marker
b = character
c = text

Possible limitations: User should put a new color tag in each row.

Until Monday, I will not have much time to work on this function... Then I'll see what I can do (but I do not promise success).

this was an excellent discovery and thanks for developing the whole tool but when I input \color{4}{1}{blue text marked red} in eactmaker and export g3e to the Casio FX-CG emulator I only get exact text as input above without any marking or character colours? Anything I do wrong or is there another fix for this please - many thanks in advance

[helder7]

This functionality has not been implemented yet (sorry).
If I remember well, it turned out to not be added at the time since would be necessary to change a bit the way how files are generated, to put the color working with multibyte characters, math expressions, etc... The priority chosen was to add more formats/calculators, and that's what has happened over time, and only then add "secondary" functions. With the latest update, the goal of support the majority of Casio calculators (including the new fx-cp400) has been achieved.

[AmazoNKA Profile]

Thanks for the explanation and the tool. I hope you could implement the colour at some point to - let me know if you need any testers for this. Thanks again in advance