This page contains information on a number of ways to program the Prizm.

Casio BASIC #

This is the method with the lowest barrier to entry; it’s also the only one supported by Casio. It consists of making programs that run within the “Program” menu of the calculator, in a BASIC dialect that is common to many Casio calculators. An essential guide on how to program in Casio BASIC on the Prizm is detailed in Chapter 8 of the fx-CG 10 / 20 software manual. BASIC programs are most useful for simple programs that work with formulas, for example. Being interpreted with a slow interpreter, programs are not especially fast and are quite limited in terms of what they can do. They can’t be very big, either, since they are stored in the Main Memory which has only 61 KB of space available for the user. Their only advantages are the ability to directly use the catalog of math functions and graphing tools, and the fact that they can be created and edited on the calculator, without a personal computer or additional tools.

LuaZM #

LuaZM is a port of the core features of Lua 5.2.1 to the Casio Prizm. Available since September 2012, its latest release happened later in the same month, and development has since then paused for an undetermined amount of time. LuaZM scripts allow for finer graphics than BASIC programs, and are faster too. However, the lack of support for many Lua libraries and some bugs can deem it inappropriate for more complex programs. LuaZM includes a REPL like the desktop command-line version, however, programs can not be edited directly on the calculator (except through the use of a text editor add-in). Lua scripts can not make use of the function catalog available to BASIC programs, either. A possibly outdated reference on LuaZM-specific functions can be found here.

Add-in Development #

Add-in software appears as additional icons on the calculator’s Main Menu, and in some cases as additional eActivity strips. Add-ins are compiled and run directly on the calculator’s CPU, having privileged access to the whole system. Because of this, add-ins allow for the most powerful 3rd-party programs. The calculator enthusiast community has known how to make custom add-ins for the Prizm since at least April 2011. The downside to add-in development is that it’s much more complex than the previously mentioned methods, definitely can’t be done on-calculator, and since they are so powerful, they can even destroy the calculator. You have been warned, but don’t fear: if you stick to a number of well-tested features and don’t do anything too exotic, it’s unlikely that you’ll cause any problem.

A number of Software Development Kits (SDK) have been made to facilitate add-in development, but unlike what happened with the fx-9860G, Casio has not released an official one. At Cemetech, the most used SDK is PrizmSDK, which includes as core component a library called libfxcg. This SDK compiles add-ins using GCC, cross-compiled to target SH4A CPUs. This is unlike other SDKs which use Renesas’s proprietary compilers along with a mix of libraries and tools from the fx-9860G official SDK modified to work with the Prizm. Another core component is mkg3a, a tool that takes the result of the compilation and packages it in G3A format, ready for use on the calculator.

Unless otherwise noted, information in this Wiki, namely the syscall names, is relative to the PrizmSDK and libfxcg.

The SDK setup guide discusses how to get started building add-ins.