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Handhelds Hardware

PalmOS Emulation On PocketPC 121

Posted by timothy from the your-battery-life-may-vary dept.
TimeTrav writes "Check out this review of a PalmOS emulator for the PocketPC platform. At this point, it only runs V1 and V2 roms, but work is underway for V3 and V4 rom compatibility. If this works, I may just have to fork over the cash for an iPaq. This has pretty profound implications; its like carrying two handhelds in one, if it works." This helps answer an old Ask Slashdot question as well. Now, will it be able to run Linux on PalmOS on WinCE?
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PalmOS Emulation On PocketPC More

PalmOS Emulation On PocketPC

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  • Beta Tester's View on PalmOS Emulator (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am one of the beta testers on the emulator, and would like to clear up/mention a few things.

    Right now, on a standard 206mhz iPaq, there is about 75% speed, with no optimizations. ARM assembly is planned to be put in, putting the iPaq over the top. Same with the MIPS versions.

    Custom ROMS such as LinuxDA might be able to run, no way to tell on the current beta. Try it out on the desktop emulator, if it works there, it just might can work on the PocketPC Palm emu. No guarantees on this one though.

    The current Palm emulators can't be ported to PocketPC, as they end up being too slow. Look at Conduit's Emulator, or Jimmy's. They run too slow, and can't run the latest roms.

    There shouldn't be many legal troubles, although it may seem so on the surface. All emulation is being written from scratch, and the new grafitti area in the new beta, was created personally, and is not like the Palms. ROMs will always be provided by the user.

    Like what was mentioned before, this opens up all the PalmOS apps to PocketPC users. Various apps have no PocketPC equivlant, look around and you'll find some Palm only stuff.

    -sponge@captured.com

  • On topic FP? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:53AM (#67263)
    Has it occured to you that *somehow* you have a relevent, informative, on-topic, and decently lengthy comment that is also a first post? Ah! The trolls arn't what they used to be!
  • PocketPC is not Windows CE. They are two different operating systems. Windows CE (as far as I know) began from a Windows 9x codebase. PocketPC was written from scratch for portable computing devices.

    Don't mix them up!
  • If the distributors are smart, they can point back to Palm's Developer page, which they can download the ROM's for free.

    --
    WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
    $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
  • Why didn't they just port POSE from Palm to WinCE? The code's GPL'ed, and already works for Win32, Unix (w/fltk) and MacOS, with full capabilities. It also already works with PalmOS 1, 2, 3.x, and 4. Why?

    I also think there's already a Palm-on-CE emulator out there that's a port...

    --
    WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
    $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

  • Distributing the OS with this? (Score:4)

    by Craig Maloney ( 1104 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:59AM (#67267) Homepage
    Wonder how long before Palm clamps down on these folks Apple-Style if they are releasing the OS along with their packages. :)

    It's nice to see an emulator for the Palm OS on WinCE, but honestly I don't think anyone will use this outside of the hacker community.

  • I believe the readme said that they had fixed that problem. It's been about a month since I tested the tools though, so I won't swear that that's correct. :)

    --
  • "Now, will it be able to run Linux on PalmOS on WinCE?"
    No, You can't run Linux on the PalmOS because Linux on a Palm machine REPLACES the PalmOS. It doesn't run UNDER PalmOS.
  • Any bets how long it takes until the Palm Inc's legal team will start to make some headlines? I mean, it's the same old story with every damn emulator, isn't it? No matter if there is ROM included or not, they will try it every time. Personally, I've got a IIIx and a PocketPC, and as a Palm customer I feel I have the right to run the apps that I've licensed from them on any machine I want to.

    A major advantage would be that the graffiti area is part of the display on the emulator. Presumably that would allow it to work as a soft graffiti area, like on the new Handera. I think that would be an enjoyable feature. Anyone have a Handera ROM to try this with?
  • Getting the ROM is a pretty daunting task, though. They actually require you to send them a FAX. In case you're wondering, that's a device people used back in the eighties to send each other documents. I for one had to admit defeat at that point.
  • Get PocketDOS, it does a good job of emulating an XT directly on PocketPC and it runs edit.com fine (as well as Bard's Tale, Ultima, Karateka and many other games - a welcome addition to PocketPC's anemic game collection). What's wrong with PocketWord anyway?
  • Windows market ended? Not on the planet I'm from. DOS market, yes. Windows market, no. Last time I checked MacOS was waaaay behind marketshare compared to Win32.
    ------------
    a funny comment: 1 karma
    an insightful comment: 1 karma
    a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
  • Yeah I know. I don't mean to put the burden of this on MS, I would certainly settle form emulators from Compaq, HP, etc.

  • Re:is there a pocketPC emulator? (Score:4)

    by cdipierr ( 4045 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:49AM (#67275) Homepage
    If you have the MS Embedded Toolkit which enables you to build WinCE apps, you get an "emulator" of sorts. Unlike the PalmOS emulators it doesn't really pretend to be a device (it doesn't use the iPaq ROM or anything), instead it's just another target you can build your apps for and it behaves sorta-kinda-mostly like the real devices, but there are some UI glitches amongst other problems.

  • They support a subset of the IrDA standard. If you download their developer docs, they have it fairly well documented.

    It's really pretty nice, as it can be treated a plain serial port if you wish.

  • I find that different emulators work better/worse at different games so play around.

    Most important, running Jimmie's Overclock and bump it up to 125%... as far as the keys issue. I use a targus keyboard. Its good enough for RPGs which is all I ever tried to play.
  • There are various flavours of WinCE tuned to specific tasks. The PocketPCs run a version of CE trimmed, changed, and compiled specifically for each hardware platform.

    Palm is a great organizer.

    PocketPCs are pretty good portable computers.

    I feel that most people who rag on CE so much haven't used a device lately. Yes WinCE 1/2 sucked ass. However the new stuff shows that msoft really learned a lot of lessons by continuing to get beat up by Palm. The next stuff coming out of Redmond shows even more promise.

    Keep your m105 if its a good organizer for you. I'll continue to use my IPAQ to do frivilious fancy things because not only can I use it as an organizer (and sync everything in the universe to it) but I can also play SNES, Sega, listen to mp3s, mount network shares, watch movies, stream video, etc... etc...

  • my ipaq has yet to crash

    Well, I got an Ipaq H3150 yesterday. It arrived in the mail right after I sent that last post. I hadn't put Linux on it and was messing around with wince and guess what? It locked up running Pocket Excel, not 2 hours after I pulled it out of the box, BEFORE I had a chance to put any new software on it. Kudos, Microsoft, for another engineering marvel!.
  • Now I can have a PalmOS device that crashes and only has 8 hours of battery life! Just what I always wanted!

  • Funny, When I bought my HP Journada 420 2 years ago I thought the same thing... then I got a real palm color unit to play with from work...

    Journada has 200Mhz processor 32 meg ram
    Palm - 16meg processor 16 meg ram
    Palm- kicks the WinCE device hands down in useability, speed, realiability, and most of all functionality.

    I have yet to see a Windows CE powered device that didnt completely stink based completely on the fact that the OS is slow, the apps are poorly written and the damned thing locks up easily (you have to use a 3rd party app so you can shut down programs running in the background to free up ram... What the hell is with that?)

    Sorry, Palm has nothing to be afraid of except maybe the Agenda. Windows CE or palmPC based devices are no threat, and the sales numbers are proof of that.

    #1 selling Windows based Palm device - Ipaq
    and the Ipaq is the #1 device to run linux...
    The palm and Handspring outsell all Windows CE devices 20-1

  • The IIIc I was given at work has 16 meg.
    now it was either purchased that way or corperate had them upgraded like the IIIx's I have seen around here with 16 meg in them. (We have this silly corperate database app that we have to run and had a HUGE database that get's synched every time. (20 minute sync's oh joy!)

    They may very well be custom units we use.

  • is there a pocketPC emulator? (Score:4)

    by option8 ( 16509 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:47AM (#67283) Homepage
    i know there are palmOS emulators out there (for all kinds of platforms) mainly for development and testing, but what about a WinCE emulator?

    it just tempts me to try and run, say, linux on Palm inside the Palm emultor for WinCE, inside the WinCE emulator running under virtualPC inside MacOnLinux on yellow dog linux on my G4...

    whew..

  • Just while people are talking about palms
    & ipaqs....

    anyone know what protocol is used to transfer contacts etc between palms on the IR Port? Is it a standard?

  • Linux on PalmOS on WinCE? (Score:3)

    by irix ( 22687 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:52AM (#67285) Journal
    Now, will it be able to run Linux on PalmOS on WinCE?

    Why not just run Linux right on the iPaq? [handhelds.org]

  • ....I can run win95 minesweeper under wine under linux under palmOS under Ipaq?

  • Re:Speed Implications (Score:5)

    by edremy ( 36408 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @09:27AM (#67287) Journal

    I don't know what WinCE devices you've been using, but my iPaq is amazingly quick.

    I've got Quake, a fully 3-d racing game and a flight simulator on it. It takes no time at all to load up the pocket New York Times, whereas on my (older) Pilot it can take 10-20 seconds to load a long page. Response to any button click is instantaneous. Don't get caught in the "It's MS so it's slow, buggy and insecure. Of course I haven't used or even seen it, but I'm quite sure that I'm right" trap.

    I had a choice between the iPaq and a m505 at my new job: I took the iPaq despite having used and liked Palm machines for years. Laugh at MS at your peril: WinCE3 is quite useable. Unless Palm gets off their asses and ships something far, far better than the m505 the high end market is going to desert them in droves.

    Eric

  • From the linked site:

    What you are about to see is the reason why Pocket PCs will rule the world one day!

    What...that they can run old versions of PalmOS at (probably) a slower speed than a real Palm, while chewing through batteries more rapidly? If I wanted to run PalmOS stuff, I would've bought a Palm...uh, wait a minute, I did. I have PalmOS v3.5 (not v1 or v2) running on a Palm III, which goes two or three months on a pair of AAAs and runs PalmOS apps natively. Sorry, but I've never seen much in WinCE to write home about...shoehorning a desktop interface into a handheld doesn't make as much sense as designing an OS for handheld use. The hardware may be more powerful, but what good is better hardware if the software that runs on it isn't up to scratch?

  • I could easily fill up many megabytes with text files of various sorts... references that I would always want to have with me.

    Maybe so...though the one document (I think it was the Linux Ethernet HOWTO, to give you an idea of the size) carried around for a while with Peanut Reader was crunched down to a fairly small size. I think I eventually dumped it, though; most of the places where I might need that info will have a computer with a net connection available.

    C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?)

    Are you serious? You've never seen anyone using a portable music device? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.

    With only 32-64 megs of fixed storage (barely enough for one CD if you crunch it down enough)and either no removable storage or access to (expen$ive) CompactFlash and/or SmartMedia removable storage, the typical WinCE PDA would make a poor choice for portable music. (If you have it loaded up with MP3s, where are you going to put those several megs of text files you also want to haul around?) I'm not that impressed with the memory-based MP3-player gadgets for the same reason...the only portable MP3 player I'd consider would be one that uses either a hard drive (OK) or CD-R (better) for storage.

    (Not that I have one of those either...if I take MP3s with me, it's usually on tape. It's low-tech, but it's cheap, it's ubiquitous, and it works well enough. I might pick up a portable MP3 CD player one of these days...it's not that high a priority, though, as the auto-reverse Walkman I have is still in decent shape and I usually listen to radio while driving.)

  • Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.

    In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.

    You have to realize that the IPAQ can do many things that the best Palm can't do. Complex font and format support for texts, music, movies, full color pictures, etc...

    Most of those sound like tasks for a computer or a dedicated device such as a portable CD player or DVD player, not a handheld. (C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?) Instead of doing one thing well, you end up doing several things poorly. While a Palm might not do all that an iPaq does, it does what it does considerably better.


  • Even if you are correct in saying that the WinCE device does multiple things poorly, what happens when some advancement or market condition makes memory super cheap or batteries last 5 months? The more powerful device will already support playing MP3s and movies, and Palm will be trying to catch up. If you don't need the memory or features, go ahead and use a plain old Franklin Planner.

    LS
  • Interesting! I wonder how many CE users will decide that they prefer the Palm interface and how many will feel that their purchase of a CE device is validated when they see the two OSs side-by-side?
    To be honest PalmOS is looking a bit dated now, but it still does everything very well. I feel good about it running so nicely on a 16MHz platform.

  • Re:Hmm... (Score:3)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @10:50AM (#67293)
    size is key too. i had a free jornada for a few months, but i returned it because i hated it so much.

    my palm 5 with its omnisky modem attached is still smaller than the jornada all by itself.

    when i have to drop a beeper, a PDA with wireless access, plus keys and a wallet into my pockets, i don't want to have to carry around a big ol' brick like the CE devices are, espcially when you pop the modems onto them.

    i have wireless ssh, aim and icq, plus IRC, web, email and VNC on my palm. what more could I need?
  • Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.

    Haven't checked in a while, have you? The newest Sony Clie maxes out at 136MB of RAM when you add a 128MB memory stick.

  • Doesn't anybody actually read the linked articles before posting? The guy stated that POSE is slow and bloated because its primary function is to be an application debugging tool.

  • Downloading the ROMs is not an easy process though; you have to apply and be accepted into the developer program in order to access them. Sure this is still a simple thing to do, but the average person probably lacks the patience (and wherewithal) to do it.
  • Um, perhaps the "average person" would use it for the purposes of this article: to run Palm apps. You don't have to be a developer to want to run some of the thousands of available PalmOS apps.
  • You, sir, have shown yourself to be in the increasingly large class of people known as the humor impaired.
  • Many, many programs (even ROM-level) that run successfully on real Palms fail on the Windows emulator, so it is completely unsurprising that something like an OS replacement fails on the WinCE emulator. Likely the emulators suffer from a combination of minor inaccuracies and a strict interpretation of the design constraints, whereas the hardware lets you get away with murder in some instances.

    There are a significant number of programs out there that do "bad" things like disabling memory protection and sending hardware-level commands: not supported by the books. The emulator has to emulate not only the documented OS level calls but also all of these hardware tweaks to run such programs successfully; this is obviously a much greater challenge, especially since the authors will need to do this virtually from scratch instead of using available emulator sources.
  • Duly noted. However, to truly pass /. scrutiny you should be emulating windows on linux to emulate Palm running linux.
  • You forgot to run Liberty(Gameboy Emulator) on the palm emulation ;)
  • With the addition of the CompactFlash adapter from people like MatchBook Drive [matchbookdrive.com] and Innogear [innogear.com] along with the software from Kopsis [kopsisengineering.com] Handspring devices now have compact flash storage with VFS support (Currently in beta) so they can run all the fancy apps made for PalmOS 4's VFS support (Storing data and programs on the CF cards and launching from them).
  • Palm emulator running in a WinCE emulator running on Windows through VMWare on Linux!

    -Bonk
  • In the article is states that:

    complete DragonBall (emulation except for UART Serial), booting OS1 and OS2 ROMs, and using maximum amount of memory. In the future, people can expect serial port emulation, IR emulation, application loading, booting OS3 and OS4 ROMs, color support, EZ and VZ support

    What does this mean for hooking up devices like a GPS or Omnisky modem? It seems to me that a big reason people choose palm is because of a outstanding third party support.

    I know from personal experience that emulation's are not a replacement for the real thing. I've booted up windows in linux, linux in windows, Workbench (amiga) in windows, palm and CE under the PC, and I have never found a long time use for them. I say this because I'm sure someone will post that this is a sign of Microsoft taking over palms share of the market, maybe; but I think palm will lose it's market due to aging technology and bad business.

    -Jon
  • This news isn't a big deal. PalmOS devices have the PDA market locked down tight, and this won't change that.

    As others have noted, users like Palm devices because:

    they are easy to use (they just work)

    they are reliable (they don't crash)

    batteries last for weeks

    they are great PDAs

    When I say "they are great PDAs" what I mean is that they do the things people want to be able to do with a PDA. Schedule, phone list, to-do list, calculator... all of it works great.

    It's true that the CE devices can do a lot of things a Palm cannot do -- run Doom, for example -- but the typical user does not care about most of those things. I have to admit that I would love to be able to play MP3 songs, as a CE box can do, but I don't care about this enough to make it worth the annoyances of CE.

    steveha

  • Well, the guy writing that review said this:
    The speed was better than "fine."
    One thing I wonder about: what is his baseline for speed? What is "fine" for him?

    The original Palm devices are 8 MHz. A Visor Deluxe is 16 MHz. A Visor Platinum is 33 MHz. Which of these is "fine" to him?

    By the way, Motorola has announced a 66 MHz Dragonball CPU. I'm lusting after some sort of Visor running that fast. I wonder if a 66 MHz Dragonball would be as fast as a 166 MHz ARM?

    steveha

  • The reason to run Lunux on PalmOS on WinCE is purely for the geek appeal, not because it's more efficient. Do it because you can, do it once, decide it's annoying and not quite so neat a week or so later, and then just load Linux directly on there [handhelds.org].

    Have you ever driven to the store on a rider lawnmower? Some things are just fun, not efficient.

  • > What exactly would be the point of this Linux emulation on Palm Emulation?

    Because you can.

  • Hosting company? There could be plenty of reasons for that ratio.

    To many assumptions

    Jeremy

  • That still won't be enough for me to move to a non-palm OS device.

    They still haven't gotten even close to the size of my Palm V nor its battery life. I do not want to carry a brick around that needs charging everyday.
  • that's funny, i thought that EDIT.com went away with all the others in that huge .com crash... who needs an online word-processor, anyway? ... oh, my bad; that's edit.NET
    -----
  • Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.

    You have to realize that the IPAQ can do many things that the best Palm can't do. Complex font and format support for texts, music, movies, full color pictures, etc...

    I own a TRGPro, and I am smart enough to see that Palm and crew are getting left in the dust. If people really wanted simplicity, they could just keep their trusty pen and paper organizer, which has infinite battery life and is actuall extremely durable, small, and light-weight. The pen and paper PDA is also far cheaper than any Palm clone.

    My point is that the Palm Pilots were cool a few years ago, but they are looking more and more like old hat, with every new pocketPC/Linux PDA released.
  • You are comparing PDAs like as if they were desktops. with 2 MB you'd be pretty suprised what one can do: once i figured out how to get another MB using the flash memory, i can now have the information of multiple publications (newspapers and magazines) in addition to the almost complete listings of all movies, restaurants, bars, clubs in nyc. how about generating dynamic directions to all these places by foot or subway? among other things .. a compass, mirror, a world map with 5000 cities, etc.
    yeah, you convinced me to go back to my paper organizer ...

  • snarky (Score:3)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @09:59AM (#67314) Homepage
    The tone was a bit snarky, but whatever, it is an interesting accomplishment.

    Of course, if Microsoft figured out how to make a friendly UI for their organizer in the first place, it would be closer to a moot point. (Honestly, most of the Palm 3rd party stuff isn't that great anyway, IMO as a 4-year-palm-fan) Microsoft never seemed to understand that the desktop UI doesn't scale down very well, you need to start simply and build up. That's the real power of palm.
    --
  • With only 32-64 megs of fixed storage (barely enough for one CD if you crunch it down enough)and either no removable storage or access to (expen$ive) CompactFlash and/or SmartMedia removable storage, the typical WinCE PDA would make a poor choice for portable music. (If you have it loaded up with MP3s, where are you going to put those several megs of text files you also want to haul around?) I'm not that impressed with the memory-based MP3-player gadgets for the same reason...the only portable MP3 player I'd consider would be one that uses either a hard drive (OK) or CD-R (better) for storage.
    Well, some people get by with the SmartMedia cards and such, but I agree you need hard drive storage on your PocketPC. Thing is.. you can get it. With IBM microdrives (1GB) or a whole slew of PCMCIA harddrives (up to 5 gigs now i think) 1-5 gigs is enough Mp3s to carry with me, and I like PCMCIA cause my main computer is a laptop, so I can do file transfer quite quickly.
  • I am an iPAQ owner and on your side for this whole thing, i think its a wonderful device, my needs go beyond that of an organizer.

    I just have to ask though. SNES on iPAQ? I tried desprately to get it to work. Even if i could put up with the one button issue couldnt find an emulator that would run at any playable speed. What emulator/IPAQ configuration are you using. Memory free? God knows i'd like to play Final Fantasy 3 on my paqqy, but I just can't make it playable.

    If you were just touting the SNES to make winCE look all much better, thats ok i guess, but ya really got my hopes up.
  • my ipaq has yet to crash
  • Thanks for the *official* info. I hope it doesnt get lost in this unformatted thread. Slashdot seems to get off on running a website whose only real strentgh is message board posting, yet with all these programmers they are missing most of the basic features of something simple as an ezboard, let alone some place like brighthand. Go figure. And if you post again, please use HTML.
  • Yeah, but think about the potential speed... With the WinCE overhead, you'd be lucky to get PalmOS running at a decent speed on top of it...

  • Okie... I was basing that on my Cassiopoeia E-115. Much slower than the iPaq, it had problems even running the Gameboy emulator (of course, the Gameboy emulator was graphics intensive...)

  • i know there are palmOS emulators out there (for all kinds of platforms) mainly for development and testing, but what about a WinCE emulator? Why emulate Win CE when you should just give in to Microsoft's world domination and use their products only. Then you wouldn't have to worry about such things.
  • In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.

    Good for you. Other people have different needs. I could easily fill up many megabytes with text files of various sorts... references that I would always want to have with me. When I replace my aged Palm III, it will almost undoubtedly be with a WinCE device. Costs a little more... does a lot more. You can keep your 2MB device. I'm fed up with mine.

    (C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?)

    Are you serious? You've never seen anyone using a portable music device [sony.com.ph]? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.
  • The WinCE SDK, Embedded Visual Toolkit [microsoft.com] has a PocketPC x86 emulator that runs on Win2k. The kit comes with VC and VB made just for PocketPC ready to go.

    Before you try it, be aware that there are some issues -- I haven't played with it for a while, so I'm not certain what those are (something like you can't have a VC6 + updates and EVT residing on the same box).

    --

  • What exactly would be the point of this Linux emulation on Palm Emulation? If I had an iPaq, as the editor mentioned, I would just directly install Linux on it! That LinuxDA is strange. It looks and feels just like the PalmOS, and IMO, offers little more than the PalmOS. The PalmOS, from a dev's point of view, is so well documented, that I would probably prefer developing for the PalmOS. It is small but complete, stable, and fast. Just my CDN$0.02. :)
  • Palm Linux is non emulatable (is that a word?). I and many others tried in vain to load the ROM image of Palm Linux onto the Palm Emulator, it is a non-standard ROM.
  • The emulator just simulates the hardware, you need to either upload the ROM image from your own Pilot or register as a developer with Palm. Then they will give you access to ROM images of all models, even Handspring, Symbol, IBM, and others. Some of these manufacturers handle this themselves.
  • I disagree, first off, what would "the average person" need a ROM image for? Developers on the other hand, that actually have a use for the ROM image files can figure it out. There really aren't that many hoops to jump through to get the ROMs.
  • it is completely unsurprising that something like an OS replacement fails on the WinCE emulator Just for the record I was using POSE on a windows box. I am a staunch Palm user and programmer, and would not be using the WinCe emulator ;)
  • Got me there, I see your point.

    There are of course many, many other places to acquire Palm ROMs. But if the average Joe can't get to the legit ROMs, then ones floating in the ether are pretty much out of reach as well ;)

  • finally.. (Score:5)

    by vectus ( 193351 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:57AM (#67330)
    the multimedia capabilities of Palm, combined with the stability, and speed of windows CE..

    if only love could be this sweet..

  • As a hobbyist Palm hacker, I appreciate Palm's fairly open attitude toward PalmOS. This kind of thing is likely to encourage Palm to clamp down on PalmOS with more restrictive licenses.

    Maybe this could actually further PalmOS' acceptance, but if I were a Palm Computing exec, I would be very nervous about seeing PalmOS run on non-Palm-approved PDAs (ie, without hefty licensing fees).

    Nice hack, though.

    -John
  • I was wondering whether playing around with Quartus Forth [quartus.net] was like on the original thing as it can be so low-level it could still be surprising.
    --
  • Isn't there a Macintosh emulator that runs under UNIX? Then we could run MacOS on Windows hardware. Then we could run SoftPC and be back where we started.

    It seems that we're wasting our time with emulators here. Time to get serious about getting Linux to run on the iPaq.

  • and wince is open source!
  • I meant screen *readiblity*. Most of those LCD's used on the Pocket PC's still aren't as crisp as a good 'ole B&W LCD. Sure, it's a bit of a skewed attitude, but when I'm reading text on my display my Visor rocks the Pocket PC.

    Price? $400? I'm not talking about a Prism, folks. If you're paying that much you've got other motives than price in choosing a PDA.

    The battery life is important to me. I take notes on my Visor continuously during class, and I don't feel like popping new batteries in the thing continuously. I guess that's a non-issue if you have a rechargeable unit.

    Not to mention I do have a bit of an issue with supporting a Microsoft device, but I'm not going to bring that up as others may not share my viewpoint.

  • Hmm... (Score:5)

    by 11223 ( 201561 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @09:12AM (#67336)
    This marks the end of the PalmOS reign... ... and the DOS/Windows market ended as soon as Macs could emulate PC's. Nice try. I still have a dozen reasons why I prefer my Handspring, not the least of which is cost (and battery life, and screen quality...)
  • When I bought my Visor, I looked at review and saw that on-time for Palm OS devices were 40 hours+ before recharging or battery changing.

    How long does a WinCE device last? 4-10 hours? I am curious how long newer devices last, since this was one of the pluses for Palm when I made my decision. If you have a bigger device that also needs three times its weight in batteries to do the same as a palm device, it is not as portable. If they have improved their power requirements, things just got more interesting.

  • There is no need to 'emulate' WinCE, you just have to provide HAL/drivers for your hardware and recompile it. Of course, if you are doing this for some new CPU, no commercial applications will run on your platform, but it will be a real WinCE, not an emulation of any kind.
  • As far as I know, it doesn't exist for Linux.

    It's pretty much that simple -- I do all my development under Linux because I like doing development under a Unix environment, and I detest doing development under a Windows environment.

    And just having looked at the price for Appforge -- around $1300 -- that seems like a big price to pay for something in which I'm not all that interested in doing. And that price doesn't include MS Visual Studio.

    Palm development isn't my "real" job, so it needs to be fun. If I have to switch to doing development in a way that isn't fun, I'd better have a good reason for switching.

    Sean.

  • As a developer for the Palm platform, I can think of several reasons this matters.

    Palmgear has over 11,000 apps available for the Palm platform. That number grows daily. With an emulator that could run 3.3 ROMS, the compatibility with those apps would be close to 100%. Those WinCE users would now have access to the Palm programs.

    Think they don't want them? I know from personal experience they do. I've been asked more than once if I had an IPAQ version of one of my programs -- one person promised to purchase if it ever became available.

    For us 3rd party Palm developers, it means, simply, money.

    I still have a lot of questions. Like how does one hotsync the emulator and save your files? How do you install your software?

    I also hesitate to believe that it would ever become that popular. Loading an emulator to run a program is probably too complex for the average person. If it can stay active in the background, maybe.

    Nonetheless, if they get one that can handle the 3.3 ROMS, then I suspect it will increase sales of my and other developers applications.

    Sean.

  • I've always liked the Palm scheduler better then the "Outlook"-esque one that comes with PocketPC..
  • The power of the Palm approach has been its paucity of features and their simplicity. The folks that "just want to do stuff and not tinker" love this. The power-hungry are left craving more.

    The PowerPC deliveres what the geeks want. (Sound, better programmability, faster CPUs, etc.)

    A stunt like running PalmOS on the powerPC is mostly an excersize in proving that the more powerful machine can be configured to meet the wants of both user types.


    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    ~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
  • When i joined (it was a few years ago) they required no such thing. (I don't beleive they do now)
    It may take a few days to get approved but for those in the US getting the roms legally from there is just a matter of going through their clickwrap license (those outside of the US need to snailmail a license) You can sign up here [palmos.com].
  • All of the Handspring clones have an expantion port for larger memory space (as well as modems etc.) and with the m50x out and the sony clones we have basically no limit on memory.
  • Has it occured to you that *somehow* you have a relevent, informative, on-topic, and decently lengthy comment that is also a first post?

    Seems like a waste of a perfectly good first post to me. *Sniff*

  • Personally I do winCE when I hear of people using Windows CE, however I have to pose this question. How valuable is it to emulate PalmOS on Windows CE. Doe oyu really expect to convert a WinCE user by convinceing him first to install the PalmOS emulator then having him install palm apps?

    I personally like PalmOS because it's clean, efficient hand has low resource requirements, making the hardware it runs on relitively cheap. These are the primary reasons one might buy a PalmOS device, however if someone has already invested in a Windows CE device, there aren't many compelling reasons to change to PalmOS except for application availability. Now, it appears that's no longer an issue. What a shame.

    It'll be interesting to see if this emulator will effect the upgrade cycle, in so far as when WinCE users find that their device becomes out of date, will they be more likely to buy a PalmOS device, having been exposed to it...

    Having said all this, I do realize that the primary use of an emulator is to allow users some degree of flexibility, but I'm a big fan of PalmOS and wanted to examine the potential of this emulator in the conversion of WinCE users, to the [grin] extrordinary glory that is PalmOS [/grin]

    --CTH

    --
  • What happens when some advancement or market condition makes memory super cheap or batteries last 5 months? The more powerful device will already support playing MP3s and movies, and Palm will be trying to catch up.
    The poor unfortunate consumer finds that his existing device wether it's a WinCe or PalmOS deviee, won't support the longer lasting battery or the cheaper memory and he/she will have to upgrade anyway.

    --
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • By the same account you could also say Linux is bloated because it runs on diverse architectures of hardware.

    You can stay with your grey-scale palm while I go play Quake on my Pocket PC.
  • Linux can run on microwave ovens. In fact, you can run Linux in a 32 mm square chip. Haven't you heard of TiVo? Linux can run on more architectures than WinCE, in fact, it has less hardware requirements. So watch who you're bashing.

    >Different markets. I am a professional software >engineer and need a PDA for my work while you >apparently need a really expensive version of a >color Game Boy. Besides, I have a gigahertz >Athlon with a 19" monitor, lots of RAM and hard >disk space, and a GeForce video card. Why would >I want to play outdated games on a slow handheld >with a tiny display and not much memory?

    I'm a hardware engineer myself, and I choose PocketPC for its PC-like capabilities. I didn't want a glorified $32 pocket organizer. I like being able to have a full computer with me wherever I go, with the same footprint (give or tack a few ounces -- but this will change) as a Palm. Why get a greyscale organizer when I can have a full-color system. In the later, you can work plus do all the things a regular PC can do. Since we're both professionals, I would assume cost isn't a big factor.

  • Emulator's.... Yummm! (Score:3)

    by Peridriga ( 308995 ) on Monday July 23, 2001 @08:54AM (#67359)
    Wow... I want my PocketPC to emulate my Palm so it can emulate a DOS 6.1 interface so I can run EDIT.com so I can actually use a decent freakinn text editor....

    --- My Karma is bigger than your...
    ------ This sentence no verb
    ------ Ths sntnc n vwl
  • Nope. You *can* redistrubute it, in original or modified from.
    You just can't sell it.

    --
    Two witches watched two watches.
  • PocketPC is CE, AFAIK.
    And not even MS is stupid enough to base something on 9x.
    CE started as a NT based project.

    --
    Two witches watched two watches.
  • Nice try. I still have a dozen reasons why I prefer my Handspring, not the least of which is cost (and battery life, and screen quality...)

    Screen quality is a reason to choose Visor over PocketPC? Really? Although my experience with the newest visors is limited to in-store demos and reviews, I've never read a review, even from the more palm-biased sources (which I used to read and froth over when I, myself, was a PilotPerson(tm) and couldn't play full-length movies or Quake on my PDA) which claimed that any Palm or Visor screen beat out the IPAQ's LCD, let alone the superior (indoors, at least) Casio screen. The Visor Prism is currently 160x160. 240x320 is long since standard on PocketPC units. Lets not forget that that 33MHz processor isn't going to be displaying high-quality MPEGs or the kind of media that make use of such a screen any time soon. In my experience, even the IPAQ's 206MHz StrongARM has trouble with higher resolution MPEG under PocketTV. The Dragonball, meanwhile, chokes to death on anything watchable.

    Price? The Casio EM-500, last I checked, was $375 at Cyberian Outpost and $378 at Buy.com. The Visor Prism, on the other hand, is $399 off Handspring's own site.

    Battery Life? I really can't identify with this one. It's quite possible, I concede, that my usage patters are just totally different from others', but I've never found the battery life of a piece of hardware to be the deciding factor regarding whether it is "good" or "bad" hardware. I suppose if I played movies on loop at full volume on my PocketPC all day long, it might wear out by the end of the day and the battery wouldn't survive until its night-time charge, but that isn't typical usage for me or anyone. Furthermore, I have an extra $15 battery which I can throw in if I need an extra 7-8 hours power. Heck, if battery life were really my fetish I could by ten of them for $150 and power the thing on battery for a year, under my normal use.

  • I like the idea of being able to hack around with my PDA, and since I've owned my Palm Vx, I've done my share of tinkering. One thing I've discovered though is that most hacks that radically change its performance defeated its usefulness almost entirely. For example: I recently tried installing LinuxDA on my Palm Vx. I found that I had lost all of the benefits of PalmOS without gaining any of the joys of Linux. Think about the relationship to this project.

    What makes PDA's effective for organizational purposes is their utter simplicity. Palm, I think, spent a lot of time engineering their products to be zero-thought devices that worked just how you expected them to work. I think other PDA platforms lack this almost entirely.

    Now emulating a Palm Pilot on other PDA architectures? Other than for sheer geek value, why bother? You still lack all the simplicity and easy access. I'm not arguing against the idea of an emulator. It's a neat idea. Just an utter waste when it comes functionality. It's silly.

    Don't emulate PalmOS on a PocketPC in hopes of gaining the elegance of a Palm Pilot. Just my two cents. :)
  • Totally, utterly, completely unnecessary. Why not just run PocketPC? In some ways it's a superior GUI.
  • Hiya, you guys post like crazy.. hard to keep up with you :) Here are some answers to some of your questions: - The Hotsync program on the emulated Palm will use the serial port on the ipaq to connect to the Palm Desktop suite on the PC or Mac. - The reason I didn't use the POSE or Copilot source codes is that, first: POSE is extremely slow. POSE is mainly intended to be used as a programmers debugging tool and not being a speed daemon. There is all kind of real slowniness inthere like statistics, real time debugging, fault tolerance code and profiling code. Plus it's VERY VERY VERY object oriented and that C++ overhead really makes the emulator just crawl. I really must give the programmers an eloge for keeping the source code clean, though. The Copilot source code, is the ancestor of POSE, although written in C with a slash ofC++ inthere, it's very limited. The greatest decision factor was that both used the UAE source code by Berndt Schmidt, which is itself a generic 680x0 emulator but still SLOW on the ARM. Copilot uses 0.69 and POSE uses the latest, I believe, 0.8.15 (please correct me if I'm wrong). - The reason to why I chose this approach of emulating the hardware instead of emulating the trap calls by themselves is that first, it's much easier to emulate the hardware than to write 1000+ APIS correctly. Second, that would've gotten myself in more copyright trouble that I would've wanted with Palm. Ofcourse the ROM approach can still get me in trouble, but this is more or less be debatable. - About the Linux DA running on the Palm emulator. The good part is: YES, it is possible. Since my emulator emulates the hardware itself, bit by bit without ANY knowledge to the Palm Os whatsoever, all I have to do is add support for Linux DA ROM loading and if the LinuxDA ROMs are correct, then it should work. Any more questions please redirect them either here or to info@kodeness.com Thanks for your patience, PDAFantast.
  • Here's a reformatted version for all you non-vi dudes:

    Hiya, you guys post like crazy.. hard to keep up with you :)

    Here are some answers to some of your questions:

    - The Hotsync program on the emulated Palm will use the serial port on the ipaq to connect to the Palm Desktop suite on the PC or Mac.

    - The reason I didn't use the POSE or Copilot source codes is that, first: POSE is extremely slow. POSE is mainly intended to be used as a programmers debugging tool and not being a speed daemon. There is all kind of real slowniness inthere like statistics, real time debugging, fault tolerance code and profiling code. Plus it's VERY VERY VERY object oriented and that C++ overhead really makes the emulator just crawl. I really must give the programmers an eloge for keeping the source code clean, though. The Copilot source code, is the ancestor of POSE, although written in C with a slash ofC++ inthere, it's very limited. The greatest decision factor was that both used the UAE source code by Berndt Schmidt, which is itself a generic 680x0 emulator but still SLOW on the ARM. Copilot uses 0.69 and POSE uses the latest, I believe, 0.8.15 (please correct me if I'm wrong).

    - The reason to why I chose this approach of emulating the hardware instead of emulating the trap calls by themselves is that first, it's much easier to emulate the hardware than to write 1000+ APIS correctly. Second, that would've gotten myself in more copyright trouble that I would've wanted with Palm. Ofcourse the ROM approach can still get me in trouble, but this is more or less be debatable.

    - About the Linux DA running on the Palm emulator. The good part is: YES, it is possible. Since my emulator emulates the hardware itself, bit by bit without ANY knowledge to the Palm Os whatsoever, all I have to do is add support for Linux DA ROM loading and if the LinuxDA ROMs are correct, then it should work.

    Any more questions please redirect them either here or to info@kodeness.com

    Thanks for your patience, PDAFantast.

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