Hey, long time no see.

Today I woke up to an email that alerted me to the existence of this post:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/12/06/python-snakes-its-way-to-the-casio-graphing-fx-cg50-prizm-calculator-casioeducate-casiojapan-micropython-micropython/

A funny coincidence: this happened the very same week I decided to take my Prizm off the drawer to see if it still worked (it does, running OS 02.00).

After quickly checking this forum, I now know that MicroPython support isn't exactly news - the OS update is out since late August. (Let me just quickly remind you that I've been out of this "scene" for ages, my add-ins are now unsupported, and last I heard some of them do not run very well on OS 3.x / the fx-CG 50. Not much I can do, as I don't use my fx-CG 20 - which actually has a fx-CG 10 PCB - calculator anymore, and even back when I had an interest in fixing the add-ins, I could no longer compile them properly. I mean, they compiled, but the resulting binaries had awkward bugs that were not present in the official releases they were meant to replace... I blame the compiler, linker or something, IDFK).

Still, it was fun to see Utilities featured on the Adafruit post (more precisely, the "System information" feature). It's good to know that one can at least still get to that screen, and that it still shows some information even if the model info is incorrect. It's also great to see Casio embracing "proper" programming languages that aren't as terrible as their basic, even though I'm sure their MicroPython port is as locked down as basic.

As for the email I mentioned at the beginning... well, it's actually from someone at Adafruit saying they ran across my GitHub when researching for that post, and asking whether I do freelance work. Sadly I'm quite busy dealing with the final year of my masters course, writing my masters thesis...

Good luck with your masters thesis

Long time no see, and good to see you again, gbl08ma! I had it on my to-do list to write a news article about Python on the Prizm (I even went as far as having Cemetech tweet that there would be such an article), but I'm actually somewhat surprised to discover that apparently I never actually wrote it. That's great that Adafruit featured the Python support, and that they used Utilities! Good luck with the masters thesis, and congratulations on the recognition of your expertise from Adafruit.

I got out of calculator programming after getting a full time job and bricking my third prizm, but the fx-CG 50 looks very interesting to me.... do fx-CG 10/20 addins work with it or is it a completely different board and processor?

Only small things changed like vram address if hardcoded and not retrieved by a dedicated system call the addin will not function properly on the new model but I would say majority of addins were fixed by now. It has faster processor but most addins are not affected by this. Basically a properly coded g3a should run fine on old and new model