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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

The word used should be “simulates”, not “emulates”.

The software is designed to mimic the look and feel of the old projectionist software (which ran on PP). It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.

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> It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.

Citation? Here’s IMAX Engineering confirming that it’s emulating a Palm Pilot.

“The original Quick Turn Reel Units operated on Palm Pilots. In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,” an IMAX spokesperson told Motherboard.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88x5gb/imax-still-runs-on-pa...

That's not a quote from IMAX engineering. That's a quote from an IMAX spokesperson of what engineering said. And in the game of telephone something is lost along the way. I would guess they meant: IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured a system that emulates the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists. But mixed it up in a way that means something different to us techies.

If we assume simplicity/safety trumps other considerations for a solution rolled out just before the year’s biggest release, “emulator” is probably correct and “emulates look and feel” is a spokesperson mischaracterization.

Building a whole emulator sounds more error prone than rebuilding the system with a PalmOS skin.

PalmOS emulators already exist. This is probably what it’s running.

Do you have any particularly inside information here?

You are stated this as a fact, can you provide a reference?

Are you sure? If they took all the trouble to write software to simulate how palm form inputs are rendered, why wouldn't they just create a new UI?

From the article, the design “mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists”

Yeah, and the article also quotes IMAX as stating "IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator".

You can certainly have a true emulator that also "mimics the look and feel" of the thing it's emulating.

If you have any actual evidence that the IMAX tool is not truly an emulator other than conjecture, we'd all be very interested.

There are PalmOS emulators out there, wouldn't make sense for them to roll their own instead of licensing one of those. I had one on my last Android phone that was a treat for using my beloved old Palm apps.

I suspect the HN crowd's interpretation is correct that they merely replicated the look and feel. Which makes sense - Palm is still the best GUI I've ever been fortunate enough to use.

It's likely that whatever emulators already existed didn't support whatever custom hardware is in place to interface the Palm Pilot with the IMAX projection hardware.

Fair enough. But I still can't seeing them committing the resources to build an emulator from scratch. It would take ages to achieve stability and work out all the bugs. Anyone doing this would go find a platform that's already 85% of the way there and tailor to fit.

To skip operator retraining? At least that's how I read team "it's only look and feel, not an emulator". My objection to that would be that a hypothetical outcome of a modern UI with identical menu layout not being good enough would be one of those things that you only ever learn the hard way. But who knows, perhaps it was a new UI that was vetoed out by someone in a very powerful position and then they had to skin it up. But the far more likely explanation is that they had software, were running out of hardware devices to put in projection time until someone tried their hand on running one of the numerous palm emulators in existence on an RPi or similar.

Yeah, when a child emulates their parents, they are running their brain.

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