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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
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!
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
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.
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.
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?).
Of course porting will be easy. I mean, how much difference can an order of magnitude performance difference and a change in endianess make?
Just because I can.
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..."
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?