I have a TI83 (normal, not plus) on loan from the resource room at school, because i do maths B and C. We rent them out for $30 Australian a year and give them back at the end.
Personally, i must say this : ti83s rule for everything, once you learn how to use them as a tool (and not a crutch). There's nothing like hacking out some integral calculus and then being able to check whether you screwed up by doing numeric integration on the graphics calc (83's don't do symbolic integration, 89's do i think). And then there's the games that everyone else has on their calcs.
(you know you can get Descent for the ti83?)
Anyways, a quick google for ti89 emulator turns up
http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tiemu/, a nice open-source emulator for pretty much everything upwards of the ti-84, though not 83's or 82's (damn!). You can run it on OSX too, which is a big plus for me, because the official TI one only runs on win32.
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