Texas Galaxy 67: A fragile yet powerful beast from the 90's

[jebem]

I see it as a powerful programmable machine, but suffers from a couple of poor engineering technological choices.

The case has a very weak front panel, made of fragile hard plastic, where the coin battery cell compartment round side wall can easily break when replacing the CR-2032 battery.
This is in contrast with the back cover and sliding cover, made of durable resistant plastic.
Additionally, the external paint of this front panel suffers from premature wear resulting from the sliding cover action and normal hands manipulation.

Internally, the LCD display uses a short flat cable where the deposit film trace "wires" breaks easily as well, even without being manipulated, leaving the display with missing dots.
I bought recently a couple of these machines showing this defect.
Touching and pressing the flat cable just a little bit is enough to restore the missing pixels in the dot matrix LCD.
This restores the normal operation for a few days more until it fails again.

Calculation features wise, this machine is very good for its class and generation.






Sliding cover causes excessive wear and scratches on the display lens.




Sin( pi) according to this Texas 67 model.
Somewhat Texas decided to approach the HP designs by presenting a non-zero result.
This deviates from what Texas does with all of their other models (AFAIK) where the result of sin(pi) is presented as Zero.




Integral of sin(x) from 0 to pi, using 10 intervals: