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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 :)"
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.
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.
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?).
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!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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..