TilEm on MacOS

These instructions are for TilEm 2.00. Here's my TilEm 0.973 page. I last built this in March 2016 on my El Capitan system, YMMV.

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 running on my MacOS system. I'm no expert; suggestions welcome.

I basically followed these instructions, modified slightly for MacPorts.

  1. Install MacPorts.
  2. Using MacPorts, install gtk2 and libticalcs2
    sudo port install gtk2 libticalcs2
    
  3. Download TilEm.
  4. Unzip and build it:
    tar xvf tilem-2.0.tar.bz2
    cd tilem-2.0
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
    
  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 to wherever you want them:
      cp sdkdir/Exe/*.clc wherever
        
  6. Start X-Windows
  7. Start tilem2:
    tilem2
    
    (You may have to turn the calculator on before it works!)

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