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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 :)"
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
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
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.
The IR interface could be used...
No, I think you're missing an important point here. Those "Bad OS's" generally have to run on weaker hardware. Linux can't run on hardware as weak as the Palm's, and can barely run on Windows CE grade handhelds
Given the history of UNIX and Linux, that is just an idiotic statement. Both UNIX and Linux run comfortably on hardware that is slower than the original 68k Palm, including X11 even; that's what workstation vendors used to ship.
The current PalmOS 5 handhelds have 175MHz to 400MHz RISC processors and between 16M and 64M of RAM--more than high-end workstations of not too long ago.
(I've tried it, it's painful).
Well, I don't know what you "tried", but you either picked a bad Linux installation or a bad platform. If you tried QPE, for example, it is quite heavyweight compared to X11 and includes several extremely bloated apps. But that tells you nothing about Linux or X11.
As operating systems go, WindowsCE and PalmOS have no advantages over Linux/X11 in terms of resource usage or performance. If Palm created a toolkit similar to what they are using on top of Linux/X11, it would run more than comfortably on current Palm hardware. In fact, it would probably run much better than the current PalmOS-based implementations.