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PalmOS Emulation On PocketPC
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?
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!
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
If the distributors are smart, they can point back to Palm's Developer page, which they can download the ROM's for free.
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WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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";
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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.
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.
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.
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...
--- I do not moderate.
Now I can have a PalmOS device that crashes and only has 8 hours of battery life! Just what I always wanted!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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..
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Why not just run Linux right on the iPaq?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
....I can run win95 minesweeper under wine under linux under palmOS under Ipaq?
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
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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?
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.
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 is my sig.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
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.
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.
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SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.
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. :)
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
It seems that we're wasting our time with emulators here. Time to get serious about getting Linux to run on the iPaq.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
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.
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...)
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.
science is a religion
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 space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
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
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Take an HP Jornada 420 and compare it to a Palm M500. The M500 weighs half as much (4oz. vs. 8oz.) The M500 is just over half as thick as the HP and is .7" shorter top to bottom. That matters a lot for users who carry them. The battery life on the Jornada is a piddling 8 hours of "normal" use according to HP while the Palm can be expected to last days even under heavy use.
The Palm OS is finely tuned to a specific purpose while Microsoft wants to get WinCE in everything from handhelds to cell phones. Microsoft's own web page even suggests WinCE for: ...Handheld PCs, "wallet" PCs, wireless-communication devices such as digital information pagers and cellular smart phones, next-generation entertainment and multimedia consoles including DVD players, and purpose-built Internet access devices such as Internet TVs, digital set-top boxes and Internet "Web phones." Cripes! It's no wonder that WinCE is so bloated that it requires 133mhz CPUs.
I'll keep my Palm M105. It works just fine.
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.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
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.
Why bother.
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.