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Emulate Nintendo on Your MessagePad
Green and Geeky writes "That Marvel of a PDA, the Newton MessagePad, has always been a good product. It does a lot of things: plays MP3s, connects to the Internet wirelessly, can be used to bludgeon someone, fits in your pocket (if you're a giant), etc. Now, it plays Nintendo games. Strange, yes, but still pretty cool. I can't play Legend Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Dragon Warrior on my Palm V." And I don't need to waste money on a Game Boy Advance!
http://hnsg.net/~cpace/ninendo/ I'm only on a 512 line, but this should hold for a while, lets keep earthlink off his back!
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
The Newton uses a huge number of custom proprietary chips relating to things such as its operating system and Newton data soups that have thus far made emulation entirely impossible. The mere fact that the iPaq uses an ARM chip won't allay those problems.
there is an SNES emulator for the tapwave zodiac, And there are also SNES emulators available for PocketPCs The zodiac though has the best layout for SNES IMO. The snes emulator for the zodiac is currently being beta tested, and runs very well.
Why doesn't Slashdot link to Google cached versions of pages instead of slamming webmasters using little Earthlink accounts with ~10 MB of bandwidth? Oh well. There's the google version.
If you've never actually seen the latest version of Newton handwring recognition in action, take a look here under Newton Usability. "Eat up Martha", my ass. Makes Graffiti look like the kludgy hack it is.
And did you know you can sync your Newton with iTunes wirelessly? Even the latest iPod can't do that.
Apple got everything right with the Newton except the size. What a foolish mistake they made cancelling it as a product instead of redesigning it in a slightly smaller form factor.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Pocket PC and Windows CE devices have been emulating PS1, GBA / GB, NES, Genesis, MAME, and many other consoles for a number of years now. Even PS1 runs incredibly fast due to the coding talent and dedication put in by various developers.
While this may be news for this specific platform and OS, emulating NES is very old hat when it comes to the world of PDAs in general.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The operating system is ROM. The data soups are implemented in software.
Given the number of NES emulators out there, I doubt this one is very special.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I can't play Legend Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Dragon Warrior on my Palm V.
Um, actually you can. Gambit Studios has had a gameboy emulator out for the palm os for quite some time. Some of the older palms are a little sluggish, but it works.
Here you go. PalmOS up to version 5.x is basically the equivalent of MacOS 6 before the Multi-Finder. It's no accident...the people who wrote the PalmOS were former MacOS developers. A Palm, to me, feels like a Compact Mac shrunk down to a handheld size and weight.
Now if only I could make my m125 chime when I turn it on and make the generic Mac system beep when it encounters an error...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The Apple Newton was discontinued in 1998.
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The Newton browses the internet wirelessly via Airport (a.k.a. Wi-Fi or 802.11);
http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~ngc/eng/newtwave.htm
syncs with nSync (OS X)
http://www.everchanging.com/newton/
syncs your MP3 collection with iTunes
http://www.pixell.net/newton/
runs a Java Virtual Machine (waba)
http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/projects/newton/waba/
there's been a VNC client since... ever
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/saweyer/newton/vnc.
A processor accelerator is available
http://shop.pixsolution.com/catalog/product_info.
Apple was one of the original investors in the ARM technology, from way back before Intel ever dreamt of buying it. The Newton runs a RISC StrongARM at 162 Mhz (compare to a 2003/Tungsten T2 running OMAP/ARM at 140 Mhz !!!)
If anything, the major weakness of the system is its limited memory heap, but we are talking about a 1997 design here.
Can you say... Apple ahead of its time?
The next pasture is always greener
For me personally the best Pocket PC emulator is Pocket Nester. It runs nintendo games at full speed with perfect sound on my toshiba e350. Nintendo games are optimal because they are easy to find on kazaa (and I don't feel bad downloading them because back in the day I used to own almost everyone that came out) and they don't take up much space. Nothing like playing Dragon Warrior 4 in class.
Open Source Sushi
If you want to emulate nintendo games, there are native emulators for the iPaq and other PocketPC platforms. Just check out pocketNES for example. It runs at full speed, no frame skip, and even COLOR, something that the newton does not have.
"I can't play Legend Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Dragon Warrior on my Palm V."
A quick google-search for palm nintendo emulator turns up this as the first result...
Actually, NES gamepads for the Newton might become reality.
->www.chuma.org, ranting and Newtons, what more could you want?
... with hooks to proprietary data command sets instructing custom chips onboard to do things ... that you can't ... do ... on other PDA's ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
What I want is a little handheld computer that runs Mac OS 6. It wouldn't be that hard to do and you have a literal ocean of abandonware out there you could use with such a device.
Merry Christmas
By the later generations of the Newton, the handwriting issue had ironed itself out, and the solution that Palm used had first seen the light of day as an add-on to the Newton.
The price issue wasn't a killer, either, because the eBook was in the $800 range, and shrinking the package down to Palm (or even Psion) size would have halved the price (no keyboard or large touch screen.) The guts weren't too far different from the Psion, which was in a nice price point.
The Palm was not a step forward, and the fact that even today that it relies on glyphic shorthand alphabets rather than true handwriting recognition, even though it has access to more horsepower than even the Newton 2100, is telling.
SoupIsGood Food
IIRC, the Newton has one truly custom chip (which does memory interfacing, DMA, interrupts, timers, A/D for the tablet and so forth).
The kernel makes extensive use of the ARM 610's MMU (especially its domain and sub-page-granularity protection features), so porting the OS to another platform would be quite exciting, but the application (Newtonscript) world is pretty isolated from the wacky stuff going on the OS. You could probably fake-out a fair amount of the OS and the apps would run.
Here's a reference to a paper on the Newton OS that we presented at CompCon in 1994.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
You've just hit a FAQ!
1. Tap and hold next to the word until the pointer turn into a large dot. Then drag over the word to select it.
2a. Rewrite the word. or,
2b. Double in the selected word and select the correct word out of the list, or click the keyboard button to enter it with the on-screen keyboard, or click the underlined a and just rewrite the incorrect letter.
Let's see, that's 3 ways to do it. You claim there are none. Do yourself a favour and give your Newton to someone who cares enough to spend 30 minutes discovering how to use it, instead of talking out of their ass.