RePalm – Hardware Emulation of PalmOS | Hacker News Reader

RePalm – Hardware Emulation of PalmOS

dmitry.gr

175 pointszdw37 comments

Cool to see my project-in-progress here. Happy to answer questions.

there's still a lot to do until I'm ready to produce hardware, but a lot already works. The plan is to update the article as I go along, and eventually open source everything once I'm convinced it works at least well enough to be used.

Really enjoyed reading it thank you. I miss my Palm Pilots. I love the UI, both functionally and the aesthetics.

I'll have hardware you can build for $20 that will run PalmOS soon. Stand by.

That's very cool. Good luck!

I can't wait, thank you!!!

Is it likely that there would ever be alternative inputs than Graffiti? While I loved Graffiti at the time, a ios/android virtual keyboard with a decent capacitive touch screen would be nicer today.

Palmos always supported other virtual keyboards. Sony had decuma for example.

I would really appreciate it if you were to release your DAL and "runner".

I would really enjoy having a workable way to emulate PalmOS on top of Linux/Android.

StyleTap is just too pricey and almost abandoned at this point (it tends to give a black screen on modern Android), and PHEM/xpilot/POSE, while open source, just emulates m68k meaning you're stuck with OS4 ROMs, no PNOlets, no high-density, difficulty integrating with host services, millions of bugs, ...

Re: code: I shall release it once it works a but better. That was always the plan

Styletap implements a higher level API (boot-level ish) so it is less compatible.

I'm curious why you didn't choose to emulate the Palm hardware itself, much like e.g. a Gameboy emulator would, and thus not need to worry about the internal structure of the software.

Wouldn't be fast enough to be real-time. Also emulation is never good on batteries. I want to build real usable devices. On batteries.

I think I got the wrong impression from your article; I thought you were trying to write something like a Gameboy emulator.

As to not being fast enough, smartphones now have multiple >1GHz cores, and emulating an ARM with an ARM naturally leads to virtualisation-ish approaches. It doesn't seem a mid-90s/early 2000s PDA would need that much computing power.

Tungsten C had a 400-MHz ARMv5 core and 64MB of RAM

Good luck emulating that realtime on your phone with good battery life (or at all). :)

There were already some reimplementations of PalmOS on top of other operating systems.

e.g. PalmOS's own "Simulator" was a reimplentation of PalmOS on Windows. It would contain a x86 ROM that would "thunk out" for some ROM libraries (including the DAL) into separate .dlls that would do the equivalent Windows calls. I always though that if I ever wanted to start my own PalmOS clone I would start by looking at those.

Garnet VM by ACCESS was exactly the same thing except for Linux and Gtk+, and compiled for ARM. Namely, an original PalmOS ROM blob with some libraries implemented as external .so that would perform Gtk+ and Cairo (!!) calls.

Most probably, this was actually developed as part of the entire "PalmOS on top of Linux" project that PalmSource actually still had when they were bought by ACCESS.

StyleTap was a 3rd party commercial reimplementation. You can see it still has some drawing glitches and differences versus an actual PalmOS. It is available for both Windows (CE) and Linux (Android).

So I think Linux does make for an excellent host operating system, after all.

All of those modified the os at much higher levels. RePalm runs UNMODIFIED OS, with only DAL.prc replaced. Literally: use the T|T3 rom and you get a tungsten t3. Use a Sony TH55 rom, and clie organizer runs as on a real TH55

This work has great hack value. It's good to see people doing things like that.

Also, the Palm devices were great little machines, with some interesting technical tradeoffs for developers to push the very modest limits of the early hardware, which made sense. I did an app for an early one, and also put the API docs in more usable formats. I looked at the later Palm hardware again recently, when I was deciding where to go for Linux handheld hardware after Replicant, before I decided on PostmarketOS devices. https://www.neilvandyke.org/t-map/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/padr/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/

Palm devices were great little machines, with some interesting technical tradeoffs for developers to push the very modest limits of the early hardware

I had a US Robotics Palm Pilot III. I did two exceptional things with it:

1. Wrote the content for my second web site (sold for six figures) on the roof of my apartment building after work using a Palm Pilot with the foldable keyboard.

2. Used the sync cradle to connect to the RS-232 port of an early GPS (around 1999-2000, I think) ripped out of a friend's Honda minivan. There was a program for the Palm that could take B&W bitmap images of maps, then scroll the map in sync with the incoming NMEA data. The hard part was that you had to tell the program the coordinates of the northwest and southeast edges of the bitmap so that it could scroll the correct amount.

- The maps couldn't be too big because of the memory limitation of the Palm.

- This was before Google maps. I think the only online map service was Terraserver, and you couldn't download images, so I took screenshots of the city overview, converted them to B&W and used those.

- You could only have one map. No stitching.

- No zooming.

Also, it took forever to lock into the GPS signal, though I think this was a problem with early GPS receivers and not a Palm issue.

That's pretty neat, for something that originally not much more than a calendar PDA. :)

If you want a more powerful handheld from that era, see the iPaq that came a little later. I'd kill for a good Linux handheld like that today (hopefully more people will pitch in on making PostmarketOS that handheld).

> 1. Wrote the content for my second web site (sold for six figures) on the roof of my apartment building after work using a Palm Pilot with the foldable keyboard.

Tell more!

> forever to lock into the GPS signal

The semi-modern GPS would do estimates of where the satellites moved while “off”. Today, wifi and cellular base stations help seed the location precision.

There are so many tools for late 80s/early 90s cars/car-mods that _ONLY_ work on PalmOS devices.

This will be a godsend to that community if it works.

Can you please elaborate, any examples or explanations you can link?

The Rtek ECU upgrade for RX7s. PLink for old Miatas. MMCD Datalogger for early 90s Mitsubishis.

Some photography software also run on palm. And even a scheme programming environment.

Amazing hack project .... and reading thru you see took only 2 weeks to write CoretexEmu. Amazing. Seriously reading this stuff impresses the socks off me and Im in awe of someone who can manage their time for writing enterprise products like VMware, flying planes(author has 2), and hacking at this depth. Kudos unlimited!!

Thanks!

The secret is three-prong: I absolutely love doing this (despite this project having no practical purpose), I have a FAANG job, and I have no family of my own.

What does FAANG have to do with it?

Question was as to how I have the time. FAANG job means that I don't work 80 hour weeks

I was really convinced Palm was going to do something cool when I got my Tapwave Zodiac which had an 8M ATI video card in it, which allowed some decent 3d mobile games to run. I was way wrong, unfortunately. I till love that device though.

Wow!! I’ve been snooping around your webpage looking for updates every now and then and here it is. I am actually am starting a custom CPU project for which I might want to write an emulator and this will help me a LOT. Thanks for starting on this and sharing your progress. Appreciate it. Anybody reading this, Dmitrys c codebase is a must read for anyone even remotely associated with systems programming.

I wonder if he can get PalmJoint running again? "Beam me up!"

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/997939444660523009

https://donhopkins.com/home/PalmJoint.prc

https://donhopkins.com/home/PalmJoint/Src/PalmJointMain.cpp

Whatever a PalmJoint is, you appear to be the only person in Google who has mentioned it.

That's more because Google's search quality for old and obscure things is abysmal (and has been going downhill for a while.)

(Incidentally, there's already an item on the front page currently discussing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907 )

Also because I just beamed it around to people at CodeCon, but couldn't ever manage to land that distribution deal with Sony to ship it on every Clié, alas.

My Pet Rock Remote Control for the PocketPC never got off the ground, either. ;(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg

Oh yay I can get Vindigo running on a device again

Fancy seeing you here Dave. ;-)

I have recently picked up a Handspring Visor from a Value Village for $5.

It has been indespensible beyond words.

When I go to pick up my iPhone to take a note, I end up seeing my notifications, scroll through Instagram for 5 minutes, until I get up and make myself a coffee and forget not only to write the note but what the original idea even was.

With my palm, I just pick up and write. These things are golden.

... that sounds like a neat idea.

Does anyone know why Cobalt never made it?

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