I may be new to the whole Newton thing, but I've done a few
emulators over the years and I have a few thoughts about different ways to
create a palm emulator.
First, statistically a StrongARM newton is powerfull enough to
emulate a Palm (which uses a low power variant of the 68000 running at
something like 16MHz) in realtime. An older MP1x0 or eMate would run things
quite a bit slower, of course... The Newton screen is bigger than the Pilot
screen. Big enough to include the Pilot screen, the Pilot silkscreen
buttons, and a "grafitti" area. No problems here.
The easiest way to get a Palm emulator running would be to adapt an
existing emulator, such as CoPilot. The CoPilot developer has made source
code available, which would be a good place to start. The main problem with
CoPilot (and other chipset emulators) is that you need to have a copy of the
Pilot ROM in order to get it to work. Since many (if not most) Pilot apps
run on older Pilots, this isn't that big of a deal. I see old Pilot
Professionals and Personals for sale for $30 or so all the time.
A nicer way to go would be an emulator that emulated the complete
runtime environment of the Pilot. This is difficult from a programming point
of view, since you have to emulate the PalmOS as well as the Pilot machine.
The upside of this is no one needs to have a copy of the Pilot ROM to run
it. The downsides are increased development effort, and the possibility of
getting the PalmOS wrong and having apps run incorrectly.
If I was writing a Palm emulator for the Newton, I'd adapt CoPilot.
It would mean that users would have to get a Pilot to get the ROM from, but
you would get the benefit of starting from a fairly well tested emulator,
and using a well-tested real copy of the PalmOS.
Jim Anderson
ABC 3068
'81 R65 'St. Max'
Long-EZ under construction...
Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts. Study Hard, Be Evil.
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