Firmware birthday ?

[jte]

There’s a bunch of places in the standard Plot views where additional RAM could be put to very good use (even just the 32MB of the G1). Many of the Plot views were designed around the RAM constraints of the 39gII (1/4MB).

Without a background picture enabled, the standard Function Plot view, for example, does not use any backing store (offscreen pixel buffer) to keep track of pixels behind the barberpole / marching ants cursor, the tangent line, or the areas covered by the Signed Area display. In each case, permutations of RGB values are performed per-pixel — permutations so that they can be undone as needed (without knowing what the original RGB value was before the visible “overlay” was applied). This design, while minimizing memory use, does introduce a bunch of complexities. If a single pixel is ever mishandled, that bit of “pixel dust” would remain until the Plot view had to completely refresh — which is not the case when simple panning is done. Panning moves the bulk of the pixels around on the screen and only plots “fresh” pixels — those brought in on the edges. Some of this can be seen quite easily when panning views with the barberpole / marching ants cursor and / or tangent line enabled: those overlays will flicker while the rest of the plot does not. (The implementation is: undo [some of] the overlays, scroll, redo [some of] the overlays. Turning on all three and then panning around should be illuminative to those interested...)

Going from 32MB to 256MB: there are at least a few fun plotting features that this increase makes much easier (/ practical / realistic) to implement. (In Graph 3D, for example.)