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Commodore 64 Emulator For Your Palm Pilot
Ridgelift writes "PDALive's got an article on a port of Frodo, the free Commodore 64 Emulator for your Palm Pilot. I can't wait to get this running so I can play M.U.L.E. on the road!" Update: 12/01 02:41 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "I thought I should point out that there's also a really great Atari ST emulator for Palm called 'CaSTaway.' You can find it here. It's free and released under GPL :)"
"... Frodo, the free Commodore 64 Emulator for your Palm Pilot"
Lends a new meaning to 'What hass it gots in its pocketses??'
RD
I'd like an Apple II emulator for my Palm Pilot so I can play Oregon Trail on long road trips and get myself thinking bad thoughts.
The coolest voice ever.
I still play (emulated) C64 games on my PC - they're lots of fun, and are very addictive, though somewhat lacking in the graphics department.
I find it strange that the Palm, and generally all modern PDAs and cell phones have 20 times as much power as the old C64 in every measurement, yet most of the games suck.
What is the big deal about this? It is somewhat of note on PalmOS, where creating emulators is a lot harder than on WinCE or Linux, because of POS's architecture.
On WinCE (PocketPCs) and Linux PDAs, there are a ton of good emulators, and for a number of systems, more than one. Off the top of my head, i know I've used on WinCE: GameBoy, SNES, NES, MAME, C64, and NeoGeo.
While there aren't as many, there certainly are a handful of emulators for PalmOS, although I have only used the good Liberty GB emu.
So why post this? Should we start posting when any PalmOS package is released, like it is some big event? It may be of interest if it were the first emulator for PalmOS, or the fist C64 emulator for a PDA- but it isn't. And it certainly is not anything exceptional or of note, although my kudos goes to the developer, it is good to see people pushing the limits of PalmOS 5 and under.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Frodo is a highly portable program and currently has versions for Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, Playstation, Dreamcast and Symbian telephones to mention just a few.
You know, I never felt my Dreamcast was fully functional unless I could program BASIC on it.
Move over, Soul Calibur, GOTO's coming!
The coolest voice ever.
Most of my Commodore 64 stuff I do uses special utility cartridges, and a floppy disk drive or two. Without a true keyboard it limits it more.
Though playing some games like the atarisoft, Legacy of the ancients or Fort Apacalypse does hold some appeal.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
"Palm Pilot" is the the name of a discontinued model. The platform is just "Palm". And please, we've heard all the masturbation jokes!
Even with jokes aside, just saying "Palm" is kinda ambiguous. I mean, yeah, people will figure out you don't mean your hand, but still, "Palm Pilot" gets the idea across in a much more effective manor, the wishes of corporate flunkies and platform fanboys aside.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
If your point is that "Palm Pilot" is an outdated name for the devices now known as Palms or Palm Handhelds, then you'll be pleased to learn that the project site doesn't use the term "Palm Pilot."
Before you confuse people, though: the Zire 21, Zire 71, Tungsten E and Tungsten T2 models all have ARM processors and ship with Palm OS 5.x.
Breakfast served all day!
Frodo is open source and seems to be easy to port. Shouldn't be hard to make it work on DragonBall Palms.
OK, you're technically correct (they're no longer called "PalmPilots") but there are plenty of Palms that fit these requirements nicely. If you take exception to them being called "PalmPilots," well, then you're just picking nits.
How about a Zire 71? There must be some miscommunication here, because there are plenty of OS5 ARM Palms. Are you thinking of OS4?
u ct Id=1283240
http://store.palmone.com/product/index.jsp?prod
I suppose telling someone that his 486 is an Intel CPU and not a "Pentium" is picking nits too..
Okie dokie:
Tungsten T2
CPU: Texas Instruments OMAP(TM) 1510 - 144 MHz ARM processor.
OS: Palm OS(R) 5.0.
ARM designs are licensed to Intel, IBM and Texas for manufacture. It's an architecture rather than a branded chip like the Pentium or whatever.
I mean seriously, you didn't expect a C64 emulator to run on one of those old 8MHz DragonFart chips Palms used to have did you?
You talk as if the purpose of language is to communicate. How naive! The purpose of language is to avoid lawsuits!
... they find a way to plug a C64 into broadband
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
Yeah, still doesn't answer my question. A PalmPilot has a DragonBall CPU and 1meg of ram for the pro model.
"Frodo is open source and seems to be easy to port. Shouldn't be hard to make it work on DragonBall Palms."
Riight... cue slide show...
Ok, look, it's only the poster that's wazzed it up ok? The site itself says Palm, not Palm Pilot.
Emulators like this are one reason why I am not so worried about retaining access to files in obsolete formats. As long as you carefully transfer old files and their corresponding applications to new storage media, you can hope that a emulator like this will give you access to otherwise lost data.
Its not a perfect solution -- emulators don't support special hardware or obsolete storage equipment and not every machine gets an emulator.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Commodore 64 ethernet card
Commodore 64 web browser
How useful these really are, I don't know. But they exist.
~Philly
PalmApple has been written. My poor Handspring doesn't do it justice, so I really can't speak to performance.
Oregon Trail sold seperately.
Sure does take me back. Once again I can do...
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Omnis amans amens
If you want to be less ambiguous, I'd suggest saying "Palm PDA". Saying "Palm Pilot" creates the mistaken impression that the emulator runs on old Palm PDAs. I don't see how an untrue statement gets an idea across in an effective manner.
The correct terminology is the Palm Computing Platform. That encompasses any device running the Palm OS, including Sony Clie, PalmOne Tungsten and Zire lines, and even old school things like Handera/TRG, and the good old Pilot.
Shawn's Tech Articles
I've got it on my Nokia 7650. installed and run without any problems. Tested at couple of games and everything looked fine, even the old decompressing flashy screens. It sometimes however slowed a bit down when doing music.
You killed c64.com didn't you? Darn it, now i can't check out that game... well, there's lemon64.com ofcourse... whoops, did I say that out loud?...
Wahoo! Now I can carry C=64 with me without using PocketPC (suuucky sucky) or carry my 30 pound C=SX64 Executive Computer. Yup... That's the good stuff.
The people who put out things like this need to think further about their target audience. People like me have PalmOS 3.0 devices running on 68K processors. The 'suits' who buy a new PalmOS device every year have the new thingies. But they're not the folks who will be interested in something like this.
Oh well.
Let's make a table:
Handheld Platform: Porting Effort
Linux/X11 (handhelds.org, Yopy): trivial (some layout changes)
Linux-QPE (Zaurus): modest (reuse libraries, rewrite GUI)
PocketPC: significant (lots of API limitations relative to XP)
PalmOS: extreme (can't write all-native apps, memory limits, no file system, no resizeable windows, no layout manager, no multitasking, no standard APIs).
Ironic, isn't it, that popularity is inversely proportional to difficulty of software development? Of course, that's a pretty general rule.
Now, why is that? Well, look at this news item. When someone ports a Commodore 64 emulator to a Linux/X11 handheld, it's not news because it's so trivial. When someone ports it to PalmOS, it's big news. I once ported a web browser to a Linux/X11 handheld, and that wasn't news either. You still can't get anything of comparable quality for PalmOS, and so every junky PalmOS web browser is a news item.
Bad OS platforms make for good press, lots of business opportunities, and lots of PR. Programmers feel proud when they have mastered a bad platform and managed to create the tiniest app for a bad platform. That's why PalmOS and Windows XP keep winning in the market. What to do about it, I don't know.
Even if this works, how are they going to get four players going at the same time? M.U.L.E. can be played with three computer opponents, but the game's really at its best when played with at least three human participants.
I'm gonna try to educate people about the name of the product so they don't keep confusing other people.
The fact that "most people" repeat something that isn't right never struck me as a good reason to repeat it myself.
Ok, lawyerman, you're right, "Palm Computing Platform" just rolls off the tongue.
"PalmOS" might be a better choice that accurately and succintly says what people usually mean, but suffers because it doesn't have the recognizability that "PalmPilot" has... "PalmPilot" one word, is how the culture was introduced to the series of devices, and is still where the hook of recognition resides.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Its just going to take all the fun out of watching the tv for an hour, looking at all the prety colors while the tape loads!!!
You Lawyer! You know, the word 'language' has more meanings than just 'small print at the bottom of contracts'.
Just like how the word 'windows' can also mean something made of glass.
Does the emulator support the C64's sound?
And...
The reason this is such a big deal is because the low resolution of the C64 looks just fine on a small screen. It looks like crap on a VGA monitor because most games of that era were designed with TV in mind. Many of those games looked better because the black line on every other scan line was a sort of "anti-aliasing" which made many of those games look nice.
Also, there were MAJOR titles released for the C64 that would NEVER be writing for the Palm. Like the Ultima Series (up to Ultima 6...I think?).
"Frodo, the free Commodore 64 Emulator for your Palm Pilot. I can't wait to get this running so I can ..."
... play the old game of Stroker.
Never had a C64 myself, but saw this once on a friends computer and pissed myself laughing.
Emulators like this are one reason why I am not so worried about retaining access to files in obsolete formats.
That works okay for mass-marketted gaming platforms. But what if you have files written by Word X.Y. It is a safe bet that the next version of Word will read them. However, get a couple of versions down the line and it will claim that the file is in an unknown format.
it has the right resolution, but unforunatly an arm processor is required to emulate a 1.7?mhz processor? shouldnt this device be able to handle this?
spend money here
Of course porting will be easy. I mean, how much difference can an order of magnitude performance difference and a change in endianess make?
Or maybe they were just looking for a fun project and don't really care who uses it. They aren't selling it. They get nothing whether 10 or 1000 people download it. I don't really think of a "target audience" when I start working on a project. Usually it's because there is a piece of software that I need that doesn't exist.
Just because I can.
Er.. My Tungsten T1 has a 144 MHz OMAP (ARM compatible) processor. Just loaded Frodo up and it's GREAT!
Now for that Atari 800xl / Amiga emulator... Hmmm...
Maybe a small Linux distro too (he asks, hopefully).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Do you think that they'll have Number Munchers for the Apple II emulator. Loved that game as a kid. It the only thing that got me past 3rd grade math.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I just ordered Pocket Hack Master for my Toshiba e355 Pocket PC. I'm hoping to be able to emulate SNES games at 60fps with sound. Does anyone understand the methodology behind overclocking, or is it just trial and error? Any recommendations?
I think the Palm games probably just seem to "suck" more to people nowdays because they're only experienced on that small screen, with limited user input devices.
At least the C64 had the advantage of displaying to a normal sized TV screen (or monitor, if you were lucky).
I've actually run quite a few Palm games that I thought were impressively well done, yet I don't ever play them more than a few times. The user experience just isn't that great on a little PDA.
I think the Palm OS 3.0 devices are ancient these days. With the Tungsten E's price range, there is no more valid "old Palm" market.
I'm cheap, and even *I* would get a Tungsten E (it's the same price as my IIIxe was).
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
You can find a great free Atari ST emulator for Palm at http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html
:)
:)
It works really well for the devices that it support, such as Sony NX, NZ, UX, TG series, Palm Tungsten T3 and Tapwave Zodiac
IMHO, this is even cooler than having a C64 emu on Palm
Good, now how about a port of Colem (the colecovision emulator)...this console would be perfect for a handheld...
The colecovision had 16 colors, low quality sound (by todays standards), low resolution, and low rom sizes (16 to 32kbytes)...
By comparison, the C= 64 had a hybrid Analog/Digital sound chip (SID), support for add-on hardware, paddles, joysticks, flight controllers, mice, and larger applications (180 to 320 kbytes)...
The earlier game consoles just make more sense to emulate on a handheld...
As for endianness, what's the big deal? It's not that hard to make your code endian-agnostic. Juddging from the list of Frodo ports, it's just not an issue.
If you're interested in emulation on Palm OS-based handhelds, you should learn the name Jeff Mitchell. He's the programmer behind XCade (an arcade emulator) and CaSTaway (an Atari ST emulator). Nifty stuff. Check them out.
The difficulty with C64 emulation lies in the VIC and SID, not the CPU.
It's a similar situation with Amiga emulation - the CPU isn't tough, it's the sodding PAD chipset that means the first PC that got AGA-amiga-native-like performance in emulation was about 1.4 GHz.
That means falling into the Windows CE trap, of big fast power-sucking hardware designs.
PalmOS 3 and earlier devices have a focused design and scope of performance. And the user can almost forget about the battery between changes.
For those of you not familiar with programming the palms, its like a 286, its multiprogrammed, you actually have to control your own tasking, its monotasking in other words.. Your programs can not be more than 64K in size, in general, but post OS 3.0 there are more freedoms.. Why do people use Palms anyhow, design constraints force developers to think creatively and keep interfaces consistent and simple. But its not fast as a Ipaq, its far from feature ridden, its the perfect example of how the a bit of marketing and advertising can influence consumer decisions better than feature rich hardware additives and processing quality. Any Ipaq could outrun and emulate several palms (why aren't they?).. And still the palms sell for around the price of some PalmPC's. So what's the point of having a palm emulate yet another slower machine as the C64? Nostalgia, and maybe the consumers know better what they want than 3Com and Handspring? Eventually there will a palmtop pc that emulates everything and people will get what they want and the technology supporting it will be vendor independent.. Like it is with telephone numbers for cellphones..
Just say no to license servers!!
Why do people keep on porting Frodo? It's the only C64 emulator available for the GamePark 32, too.
To be frank - it's rubbish. The quality of emulation is *far* lower than something like VICE, or CCS64, and this has it's consequences. As a rule, you have to find particular versions of software made for Frodo, because the majority of games out there simply won't load. With something like VICE I've never had a game that wouldn't load on it that wouldn't also fail to load on my real C64.
Surely the superb VICE can't be too difficult to port?
Ooo, a commode in yer pocket... anyone remember the tribute to Commodore and Atari in MAD Mag??
The slogan stuck - Commode Computers: A Commode in every house....
I had a IIIx for about 4 years before I bought my Zire 71. Both cost about the same, but the Zire is a much more capable device (camera, MP3, video). Eventually you have to move on if you want the new fun stuff.
Mind you, if someone ported the emulator to the old Palms I'd be very impressed.
Steve (not a suit, just a normal geek)
I've used every series of Palm since the Pilot 1000 days. Currently I've got a Zire 71, and honestly, the battery doesn't concern me in the least. I only recharge it once a week and still use it to play a bit of music each day, use it as an alarm clock and a book reader. True I don't have the same longevity that I did when I had a Palm 1000 or my III (2 months between battery changes), or even when I had the Sony SJ20 (about 3 weeks to a charge, niiice backlight paperwhite) but I think the color screen, MP3 capability, and the ability to run stuff like Frodo (which I tried and it works like a hot damn) is more than a fair tradeoff.
I also discovered a really cool use for that somewhat useless camera built into it. At the place I work, the previous sysadmin was a worthless twit and never bothered to make a map of all the phone/data jacks for each person before a lot of them moved heavy desks *right in front of them*. Even though the info's written on the plates, no human can see them without emptying the desk and moving it. Unless I slip the Palm down there with a flashlight and take a pic.
That alone makes it worth its weight in gold.
If you want to bring lawyers into it, it's their damn fault that they're no longer called "Palm Pilots". Oops. Hope Pilot Pen Corporation doesn't want to send me a C&D letter.
Dude, your comparison is so way off... PalmOS 3.0 was launched in 1998. You're comparing 1998 tech with 2003 tech ? As a matter of fact, OS5.x ARM based Palms emulate the old 68K Dragonball hardware to stay compatible with older software. Also, you obviously haven't checked /. for the last couple of years... To recap: 3Com hasn't owned Palm for god knows how many years. PalmSource (maker of PalmOS) spun off from Palm and is now a seperate company. Handspring has merged with Palm to become PalmOne. The higher-end palms run on a 400Mhz XScale. Their screens have two times the resolution of a PocketPC. Yes, they play MP3, yes they play DivX, and yes they emulate yer favourite 80's homecomputer.
It's like saying "I can't believe ppl stil buy from IBM... Dell machines are much faster and they never suffer from burnt-through tubes !"
>>So why post this?
Because some of us find this interesting. "News for Geeks" and all that. Many of us have very fond memories of the C64 (see here) and are appreciative of this article.
Besides, sludging my arse back into work after a 4-day weekend, this news actually brightened my morning a bit and gave me a new toy to look forward to.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
I cast my votes for the following favorites.
Paradroid
Wizball
4th and Inches
Test Drive (the original)
Yie Ar Kung Fu
Commando
I could go on, but those are the ones I remember the most.
Blender And Linux Fan
> As long as you carefully transfer old files and their corresponding applications
:-)
> to new storage media, you can hope that a emulator like this will give you access
> to otherwise lost data.
Hm, not always true. Imagine you wrote your letters with some C64 editing software
(maybe under GEOS). Now, even if you were still to own the files, and the software,
and the emulator to run it and view your files - how would that enable you to actually
USE them? You still can't incorporate them into the OfficeXP document that you're
writing on the same (host) machine. And probably the only way to print them is to
make a screen snapshot of the host machine, with the emulator window on top
> As long as you carefully transfer old files and their corresponding applications
> to new storage media, you can hope that a emulator like this will give you access
> to otherwise lost data.
Hm, not always true.....Now, even if you were still to own the files, and the software, and the emulator to run it and view your files - how would that enable you to actually USE them?.....
Good point. This depends on the quality of the emulator. If the emulator supports any form of copy-paste, drag-n-drop, etc., then reuse is easy. And if the old application supports a save-as-text (or similar standard format) and the emulator supports movement of files between the host file system and emulated file system, then reuse is also possible. But you are right that these features are not gauranteed.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
As a matter of fact, I did use a C=64 emulator to rescue an old "teenage angst poetry generator" written in BASIC over a decade ago. Ah, that and good old Eliza written in not-Lisp.
need I say more?
yeesh, the mods went really crazy w/ redundants and overrateds. Those are some of the dumbest moderations to make...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Yeah, I think somebody was mad at me. Not a big deal -- it was just a humorous post, not entirely ontopic.