Do you have an old school TI-84 or TI-84 CE, and are you trying to get the programs off of your calculator and into your brand new TI-84 Evo, and it doesn’t seem to be working? If so, in this blog, I’m going to show you how to convert and transfer programs from older versions of the TI-84 to the new TI-84 Evo.
My name is Brooke, and I’ve been teaching SAT and ACT prep for over two decades. I’ve written a couple of books for the ACT math section, and I’ve done several other videos on the TI 84 calculator. You can check those out if you want, but I’m going to be making new versions now that the Evo is out to help you guys learn how to not only transfer programs that you already know about but also download programs and put them on your calculator.
The first thing to do is go to TI Connect Evo, and then from there you can open the TI Connect Evo software. So, the Evo will not plug in to TI Connect software if you already have that downloaded for the CE or for older versions of the calculator. It now has software that is web-based, so you don’t even have to download anything. But you do need to go to that website.
The next thing you want to do is plug in your calculator. And once that’s detected, you can click on the button on the TI Connect Evo website, and then it will automatically pair if you’ve plugged it in before, or you can hit connect if you’ve never connected it before. On the next screen, you’re going to see options for capture screen, send files, install OS, or exit test mode.
And we’re going to send files right now. The button that we want to press is “send to calculator,” but what’s going to happen if we try to import .8xp files is that nothing shows up. And the reason that nothing shows up is that the Evo doesn’t actually use .8xp files. It uses a new file type, which is .8xp2. That programming file wrapper is not encoding the information in exactly the same way as the TI 84C program wrapper was. And so what this means is that you cannot use the exact files from your old calculator on this calculator. However, the good news is that you can use a converter to convert your programs to the new file type.
So how do you do that? The wonderful people at tiplanet.org have created a script that’s going to help you convert your old programs to Evo programs. The first thing you want to do is load up TI-Basic Program Converter. Then you can choose a file. And if you do .8xp, you’re going to see lots of files come up now. After choosing one of them, what I will do now is rather than save as .8xp, I’m going to save as .8xp2. I’m going to make sure that box is checked, and then it’s going to download.
Now that this exists, I can go over to my TI Connect software window, and I click “send to calculator” again. And now instead of .8xp, I’m looking for .8xp2. Then, I can open that and just send it to the calculator. If I want to replace a file because I updated it on my computer, I can. If I don’t want to replace it, that’s fine, too.
After it’s sent, you just click into programs on your calculator, and you’re going to go into where it says “TI basic.” Hit enter, and then your program should be there. I can’t guarantee that this is going to work perfectly with every program and every piece of code. But for now, it should be a pretty good tool. And my guess is if you have programs that aren’t working, my best advice would be to head to a repository like ticalc.org and see if you can find another similar program that’s using a different codebase and convert that.
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