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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.
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.
If your point is that "Palm Pilot" is an outdated name for the devices now known as Palms or Palm Handhelds, then you'll be pleased to learn that the project site doesn't use the term "Palm Pilot."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
Remember decades ago, back around 2004, when they only had Pentium 4s? Well, now that we have portable Beowolf clusters providing 5 gigateraflops running in our communicator implants, we can look back and laugh. Heck, now I have so much computing power embedded in my sinuses I can go back in time and post on Slashdot in 2003, before it was bought by AOL.
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?).
That's why I wish there were more emulators for the Sharp Zaurus. The built-in keyboard makes a huge difference, and would be perfect for playing the old Ultima games!
How many more do you want? There are loads of them.
Atari 400/800, PC, Atari ST, C64, Gameboy (orig/color/Advance), Mac, PalmPilot, MAME, MESS, ScummVM, SNES, TRS-80, Genesis, NES, Spectrum, TI85, Wonderswan, Amiga. If they're not at the link above then do a search of some Japanese zaurus sites.
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..."