Rp2040 runs unmodified PalmOS 5.2.8 | Hacker News Reader

Rp2040 runs unmodified PalmOS 5.2.8

twitter.com

131 pointsmariuz27 comments

I guess it‘s part of this project (can‘t/don‘t want to visit X/Twitter to check):

http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

The domain is fine. It's just a play on the developer's name that ends up looking sketchy.

Sorry for the confusion. I edited my comment to make clear that I have a problem with X/Twitter as it is now, not with the author‘s website.

Don't we all, even if there wasn't political reasons to dislike Twitter before and after it's change of leadership, from a technical perspective it can take ages just to load up 140 bytes of text or a video, which seems to point to the fact that it's driven by people who aren't too interested in crafting quality software that you can be proud of...

Yep, it's that project.

FWIW, you can replace twitter.com with nitter.net to see it (depending on why you don't want to visit twitter)

https://nitter.net/dmitrygr/status/1704350983877198013#m

For now. Who knows how long that will survive.

Thank you! It would have made more sense if the post went to this page directly, which has loads of content, and everyone can view, instead of being a link from one news aggregator site to another, which not everyone can / wan't to view, and has much less information!

Several pages into the document at http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

"I ended up writing my own kernel"

If you ever need a definition of system software engineering "tour de force", that is it.

This is badass. There is definitely room in my life for a modern reboot of an old-school PDA with better responsiveness, reliability, battery life, and interface design than a smartphone.

The absolute can-do attitude that comes through on the project pages is inspirational too.

You should ping IMAX. They still use old palm devices for their projection system and the emulator they provide is is not really reliable.

I thought they ran PalmOS in an emulator and not actual palm devices?

This is also an emulator

Very cool. But how much easier this gentleman's life would be if the source for the OS had been released as free software, like some other systems from that era (e.g. see "EmuTOS" for the Atari ST platform, based off of the GPL'd sources from Digital Research's GEM / GEMDOS via Caldera, etc.)

Which of the various corpses of Palm assets/acqusitions did this stuff end up in, IP ownership wise?

Personally I think the JIT approach is infinitely more interesting than if he had just recompiled an OS to target slightly different hardware.

Both interesting projects to be sure, but to me (and maybe the author) there's more satisfaction in running unmodified binary software on a readily available microcontroller.

Oh, for sure, though attempting to rewrite all those graphics routines sounds like a nightmare.

So weird how Palm got stuck in a halfway state between architectures like that. I suppose it's not too dissimilar to where Apple was mid 90s with the 68k->PowerPC transition in MacOS.

This is PalmOS 5. The last version - the one that ran on ARM chips.

Wow this runs amazingly smooth for such a basic microcontroller.

I know it's fast compared to palm hardware but still.. microcontrollers tend to have io bottlenecks. Nice work.

Nice, PalmOS wasn't verry fancy, but it just worked.

Looks snappier from how I remember my PalmPilot

Granted I got into them well after the two Pilot models (I think a Palm III was my first, followed by a V, and then an m515) but they were always very responsive. Far more then a m68k processor running at 20 mhz had any right to feel.

My first was a Vx (OS 3.5 iirc) and that was really snappy and overall a great ux compared to other handheld devices I have had. But after that I had two different Tungstens (OS 5.x) and those felt far slower and had much worse battery life and I did not like those as much even if they had color screens and more features.

> Far more then a m68k processor running at 20 mhz had any right to feel.

The Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500 ran on a 7.09 (PAL) or 7.16 (NTSC) 68000 starting out with 256 KB (not MB) ram for the 1000, 512 KB for the 500. With this they ran a pre-emptive multitasking single-user OS which was partly ROM-based, partly loaded from floppy. These were responsive systems as long as they did not need to pull data from floppy drives.

Another comment mentions it, but it is PalmOS 5, which already ran on ARM devices. Some of them 400MHz+ ARM chips like various Intel XScale models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Tungsten

So I imagine it was already pretty snappy on those devices. I think the RP2040 might be a downgrade in comparison...the clock speed at least, is much lower.

Yes, it was quite snappy. I used to play mp3 files on my T3 with the processor scaled down to 133MHz no problems

T3 was a beauty.

This is so fucking awesome! I love the rp2040 and palmos and this is such a fun mating!

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