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 :)"

Comments

Re:Not bad, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been seriously thinking about writing an Apple ][ emulator for PalmOS. I've even written parts of it already in 68k assembly (working on the Palm Vx). If enough people are interested I might consider continuing developing it. The Apple][ kicked ass.

Hope for all the "lost" files and obsolete formats

[G4from128k]

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.

bad platforms make for good business

[penguin7of9]

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.

Re:bad platforms make for good business

[RevAaron]

I'd put Linux/QPE and WinCE in the same category, modest. There are libraries for WinCE that make it a lot easier, SDL and some partial POSIX compat libraries that make apps a ton easier to port. Even without this, porting isn't all that bad, depending on what the original depended on. Naturally, if it is heavy into OpenGL or DirectX it'll be more work- but then again, if you had an OpenGL-based emulator [1] for Linux, it'd be a lot more than "trivial" work to port it to a Linux PDA, whether it targets Qtopia or X11.

A big consideration in porting certain types of apps to Linux or WinCE PDAs is the lack of an FPU, which very often pushes the app out of trivial into moderate, even if you're using X11 or SDL on the PDA. There are always the cheerleaders who like to praise the Zaurus unduly, magnifying the disapointment in the platform that much more.

To an extent, I agree with your assessment about bad platform and PR; if your platform sucks, every "feature," whether it's an actual feature or a fix, seems like a leap for mankind. But, in this case, I really rather doubt it is the case- more likely someone submitted the story, and timothy being relatively ignorant of what PDAs can do these days, thought it was cool and newsworthy. It is certainly cool, but emulation isn't new on PalmOS- at the very least, there are GB, NES, C64, Apple2, and perhaps some others.

I dunno, it's Slashdot, and this kind of thing should be expected. But then again, it is also expected that some schmuck like me will whine about it, share the truth and their worthless opinion with everyone else... :D

[1] Sounds silly for a 2D emulator to use OpenGL, but it's sometimes an easy way to blit yer bits...

M.U.L.E. a no-go for Palm

[MilenCent]

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.

Re:M.U.L.E. a no-go for Palm

[Chordonblue]

Perhaps a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi multiplayer interface could be created? It'd be worth trying to play M.U.L.E. multiplayer on this thing.

Actually, the Tapwave already uses Bluetooth for multiplayer games so this has already been done!

Sound and many games!

[Danathar]

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?).

Re:Addictive arcade games for the palm at last?

[mnmn]

I agree. Back then the 6502 CPU was all they had, and there were so many possibilities with the code. Most of those possibilities have been exhaused with awesome games like Doom, Lemmings, Halflife and Giants.

Old games can really be reused. The can be compiled for cellphones PDAs or simply run through emulators. Sure beats the silly Java games made to complement a new platform and built under tight deadlines.

In the future, PDAs and cellphones and pocket consoles will be powerful enough to play DOOM3s and CounterStrikes. Will be sad to see crappy Java games on those.

Re:Addictive arcade games for the palm at last?

[whereiswaldo]

Also:

Turrican (BEST C64 game ever made!)
Aztech challenge (a challenge, addictive music)
Space taxi ("Pad 4 please!")
Destroyer (awesome submarine game)
Test Drive (better than the PC version IMO)
RoboCop
Mission Impossible (extremely hard, "stay awhile, stay foreverrr!!")
BC's Quest for Tires
Super Mario Bros (of course) ... and countless other great games. Check out the comp.emulators.cbm newsgroup for active discussion that continues every day.

Re:Addictive arcade games for the palm at last?

[hackerjoe]

20 times as much power as the old C64 in every measurement

Well, not exactly. The C64 CPU was a total wuss, but it had dedicated peripheral hardware that was designed for games -- in particular the video hardware included a sprite and tile engine that did animation, collision detection, and scrolling, and it also had a multi-voice sound synthesizer. Palms have none of these things, they just have a linear framebuffer and a single tone generator, and duplicating even some of these animation and sound capabilities is very taxing for most Palms. There are scrolling action games for Palm OS, but not many.

The newer, expensive Palms (with PalmOS 5) use ARM chips, which probably do have the requisite horsepower to emulate those graphics and sound functions, and Clies have offboard DSPs for sound processing. Maybe we'll see more scrolling games in the future for Palms..