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Handhelds Hardware

Palm OS Emulator Ported to Sharp Zaurus 91

Posted by timothy from the slidey-keyboard-plus-graffiti dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Palm Info Center reports that POSE (the Palm Os Emulator) has been ported to the Sharp Zaurus using the QTopia palmtop environment. See the QPOSE homepage for more information." This could make a Zaurus a much more attractive device to those of us with lots of important info on Palm Os devices, but according to other readers' submissions it does require a Palm ROM image to function.
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Palm OS Emulator Ported to Sharp Zaurus More

Palm OS Emulator Ported to Sharp Zaurus

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  • Great! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Sir Homer ( 549339 )
    Now I can play Gameboy ROMs!
  • The PalmOS. Could that be done?

    Yeah, it's a lame joke but someone had to do it.

  • And Palm will give you the ROM! (Score:4, Informative)

    by BancBoy ( 578080 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @04:30PM (#3574975)
    Palm gives out the ROMs for various models via the web for their free "development" Palm emulator. If these ROMs will work for the emulator, you're set.
  • Anyone who has only had a minor glimps behind the scenes of emulation (or rather emulation hardware) knows that its more than hard work.
    It always boils down to:
    -Attempt to reverse engineer
    -Guess
    -Try it
    -Goto 1
    Not to mention that all these steps should be 100% error-free and highly efficient code wise...
    Major props to the emulation programmers!
    • Well, yes, but.

      The primary POSE developer is employed by Palm, and has access to all PalmOS source, so in the case of POSE, there is no step 1 or 2.
    • Attempt to reverse engineer? No. The first step is get the developer information for the CPU(s) employed by the device and start writing a software core for it that will run on your target platform.
  • are people that do have a lot of data in their palms. That suggests that they probably have a palm...

    I have 4 old palms of various shapes and sizes, I think I should have the right to use the rom on my Zaurus don't you?

  • NES Roms.... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Bonker ( 243350 )
    I'll buy the first non WindowsCE handheld for which there is a good NES emulator.

    I wanna play Mario3 on a handspring, dammit!

    • Like I said earlier, would MAME do? http://www.mameworld.net/zmame/ [mameworld.net]

      There maybe snes emus out there for the z, I haven't checked.

    • How about snes [sourceforge.net] [sourceforge] for the zaurus? There's also a gameboy [killefiz.de] [killefiz.de] emulator for the zaurus, though it's quite slow as well.

      I haven't tried the snes emulator, but I'd imagine it's slow too. It requires installing the x-windows environment instead of the normal Qt windowing system installed by default.
      • I've played the snes emulator on my z with a ton of games. Some, like Micro Machines work perfectly, others like Micro Machines 2 are a little slow.
        Cannon Fodder on the Z is pretty cool though!

    • Since you look a little confused, let me help you. If you want quality portable classic NES gaming, I suggest the following:
      PocketNES NES Emulator for the GBA [pocketheaven.com]
      Gameboy Advance [gameboy.com]
      Flash GBA Cartridge for "burning" NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance games [lik-sang.com]
      Note that you could burn all of your favorite NES, GB, GBC, and GBA games to that one Flash Cartridge because the Flash Cart comes with a multi-rom menu feature.

      With all of that gaming on the go... the great battery life, nice controls, etc... what else would you need? Also, note that running the NES emulator directly on the Gameboy Advance's hardware is far better than running it ontop of a non-realtime operating system such as Linux and WinCE. Gaming, imo, requires a realtime OS or no OS at all. I mean, who really likes those pauses in the middle of a heavy action sequence in your game?

    • Java (Score:1)

      by PiGuy ( 531424 )
      I believe the Sharp Zaurus comes with Java - if not, you could load it with Kaffe, then get a Java-based NES emulator. I don't know how slow this would be (shouldn't matter with NES, and Kaffe is fast), but a similar approach would work on many other PDAs, too.
  • Will be interesting to see if eBay will eventually start to list a destroyed Palm device (one that was run over, went through the washing machine, etc), as a few dollar item that contains a valid legal licence to a PalmOS ROM that can then be used to as an emulation in a non Palm devices.

  • Umm... Its SLOW (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23, 2002 @04:43PM (#3575070)
    I don't think this will be useful for much of anything until the speed issue is fixed. The emulator takes nearly 3 minutes to go from the Palm logo to the main icon view. I'm not exaggerating.

    Its painful.

    really really painful.
    • No problem!!! We can fix that by creating a Zaurus Emulator that runs the PalmOS emulator and we can just run both on a REALLY speedy laptop... uhm... uh.... Nevermind....

    • It can't be that slow. My 166mhz pentium mmx laptop runs p.o.s.e. at around one third the speed of my PalmIIIx, so a 206mhz ARM processor should be slightly faster than that. It's slow, but it's bearable.

      BTW, if you all don't have pilot ROM's, you could just download the LinuxDA demo roms and run that... j/k, the LinuxDA rom's don't work on POSE, anyway.

  • The website is slashdotted (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They must be RUNNING it on a palm hand held!

    Heres the text of the article [sakura.ne.jp]

  • Review of a PalmOS emulator for PocketPC (Score:4, Informative)

    by afflatus_com ( 121694 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @04:52PM (#3575136) Homepage
    Many are working to port PalmOS to PocketPC also.

    Here is a in-depth review a while ago of one of the stronger offerings:
    Review of alpha version of "PocketPalm" [pocketnow.com]

  • Sharp could provide a "migration kit" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Karpe ( 1147 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @04:57PM (#3575165) Homepage
    I have a Palm device. I am searching for a new handheld, but the devices I like the hardware the most do not run PalmOS, which is a need for me. I believe I could legally use my PalmOS ROM in the Zaurus, if I would stop using the Palm. And I would really stop, if I could use my Palm stuff on the Zaurus. If Sharp could provide users such a "migration kit" software for Palm users, that would backup the users Palm ROM and apps to a Zaurus, I guess they could really gain some part of the Palm market. Sharp should really put some resources in these emulation projects. Sell a "Palm compatible" device with much better hardware could be a nice advantage.

  • Extract ROM from USB Visor (Score:3, Insightful)

    by miradu2000 ( 196048 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @05:09PM (#3575233) Homepage
    If you have a Handspring Visor, which IMHO was one of the best PDA's ever, there are instructions for how to extract the ROM using the supplied USB cradle over at VisorCentral.com [visorcentral.com].
  • First, the emulation is VERY VERY VERY slow, at least when I tried it. Two, it's very simple to find the roms, but I'm not about to say how. All I know is google is your friend.
  • The Palm company is moving to ARM and the POSE is for the 68k processor. So it looks like it's obselete on arrival.

    • Re:It's getting obselete (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @05:31PM (#3575347)
      You don't seem to know much about this. PalmSource is moving to OS5 which is ARM based but they want everyone to keep writing software for the 68k. OS5 will have mappings from the 68k to the ARM native OS5. They say the apps will run more than 2x faster on the ARM than on the current DragonBalls.

      This means there is no reason to expect there being an immediate fork in the application development cycle for PalmOS apps. And all those apps will run on QPose (or atleast most will).

      LoB
  • remember when sony released their "enhanced" POSE that had their proprietary hardware built in, and didn't release the source? Since POSE is GPL, /. was all huffy and up-in-arms about that...
    Well check out the link to the source on this guy's page....oh wait...that's not a link....
  • OK, you have tons of stuff for PalmOS but no Palm from which to take a ROM image?
  • I don't see anything that talks about graffiti or other handwriting recognition technologies in either the zaurus or the emulator. I assume it's in the emulator at least, but such assumptions have bit me before...

    • Re:Graffiti? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Melantha_Bacchae ( 232402 )
      vanyel wrote:

      > I don't see anything that talks about graffiti or other handwriting
      > recognition technologies in either the zaurus or the emulator. I
      > assume it's in the emulator at least, but such assumptions have bit me
      > before...

      Zaurus has its own handwriting recognition (a physical keyboard, a screen keyboard, a pickboard, and a unicode selector for maximum entry overkill ;). And, the emulator has fully functional Graffiti.

      Just don't expect to be able to save anything from the Palm programs, or to be able to load any programs not included in your rom. This emulator is a good idea, and will probably be very useful later on, but you can't do much with it now.

      The Zaurus itself is a very nice PDA that doubles as a tiny little portable Linux computer. I get a lot of use out of it, even though I can't hot sync it with my iMac (no Apple support and I won't insult the little dear by forcing it to communicate with a Windows PC). I access the internet through my Airport wireless network, and can exchange files with my Macs via FTP or an OS X compatible CF card reader.

      "The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
      "Mosura", 1961
  • and away from hardware with OS bundle (aka Palm 505, V, etc).

    One of the reasons I bought 1/1000th of Palm after IPO lockup drop was that I predicted they would:
    a. survive the dot com crash (didn't know when that would happen but did know valuations were nuts);
    b. increase revenue sales of the OS to other devices to the point where it would become the major share of their revenues.

    Hardware usually has bad ROI, but software has good ROI, provided you're one of the lead providers.

    So from this we can gather that you'll be reading many many more articles on "Palm ports OS to [insert device h/w here]" over the next year - and if you read the annual report, you can read between the lines.

    In some ways, open source (e.g. BSD, Linux) threatens their market space, as the cost factor is even lower, but the patent background should permit them to survive in the evolving non-PC era of the 2001-2020 era as devices and such fade into the background. But they have successfully defended against MSFT and other attempts.

    -
  • But if you want to run the palm OS, why not just get a palm?

    Seriously though, it is fun to be able to emulate other operating systems etc. but if you find yourself really needing to use the Emulator on a constant basis for most of your programs etc. wouldn't you be better off going for the Device that is made for the OS you want to use?

    • If you end up with a large number of programs which were written for PalmOS, then you probably ought to seriously consider buying a Palm.

      But what if you're completely happy with your portable Windows device, except for a small handfull of Commercial/Proprietary programs that you would really like/need to run which have only been ported to the Palm? - For which there IS NO analogue written for WinCE or PocketPC?

      What do you do then? Do you buy another $200+ handheld just so you can use one or two programs?

      Or is saving $200 enough incentive to see if maybe the program will run in an emulator?

      Assuming the program would run sufficiently well in an emulator on your Zaurus or whatever, the one major stumbling block I can see is the issue of data synchronization. If an application was written for the PalmOS and a Palm Conduit was written for it, how do you synchronize your data if you're running the app emulated on a CE device?

      Has anyone written written a wrapper to run Palm Conduits via the Microsofty Sync-thinghie?

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