RePalm: Towards the first unauthorized PalmOS port | Hacker News Reader

RePalm: Towards the first unauthorized PalmOS port

dmitry.gr

80 pointsthunderbong16 comments

This is exciting, would love a new excuse to play space trader again and then patiently wait for picoverse to come out. I’ve been stuck in that loop for over 20 years now.

I remember wasting HOURS on the CalTrain playing space trader. And QForth (Quantus Forth?). I spent some time working for Handspring and PalmSource. I wonder if I can still remember the magick binder incantations...

Logged in just to +1 for QForth. I learnt _so_ much about computers trying to figure out QForth from the docs (on my palm pilot) in the train back in the day!!

You and me both. I saw my Visor Deluxe in a storage bin last week while rummaging through it and was hit with a deep pang of sadness as I remembered 11-year-old me checking Pieter's site every week or so in anticipation :-(

It's your lucky day! CloudpilotEmu [1] works fine in phone (and non-phone) browsers, and the .prc still available on the Space Trader site [2] works fine there too.

[1] https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/

[2] https://spronck.net/spacetrader/STDownload.html

Tangential, but: As a big Space Trader fan I remember playing the contemporaneous game EV Nova and being so blown away by it. It felt like the same idea as Space Trader (visit different systems and buy/sell goods to make money) but then with exciting space combat, an actual storyline, and so many interesting locations!!

I gave up eventually because I got stuck on a certain station, and whenever I tried to leave I was immediately killed by a swarm of stronger ships. But it was still a cool experience.

Never heard of it but I will have to check it out! Thanks for nothing, now I won’t get anything done.

The Escape Velocity series were fantastic games.

Recent and related: rePalm: Towards the first unauthorized PalmOS port - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41194806 - Aug 2024 (28 comments)

Related and less recent:

RePalm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511106 - April 2023 (145 comments)

RePalm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29197125 - Nov 2021 (6 comments)

RePalm – Hardware Emulation of PalmOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761952 - April 2019 (37 comments)

> There is no more busy signalling, but sometimes a write will be DROPPED if it is executed concurrently with a read. And a read will sometimes return ZERO if executed concurrently with another read or write, even if the old and new data were both not zero. There seems to be no way around this. Another company's dual-ported SRAM had the same nonsense limitation, leading me to believe that nobody in the industry makes REAL dual-ported SRAMs. This SRAM has something called "semaphores" which can be used to implement actual semaphores that are truly shared by both devices, but otherwise it is not true dual-ported RAM. Damn!

Any memory engineer wanna chime in as to how unreasonable such a request for "write-during-read" actually is?

The Swipe input method patent expired this year, I'd LOVE to see an option to replace the graffiti input method with a Swipe-enabled keyboard. Would really make this a daily driver.

There used to be a few of those around, but they were patent trolled out of existence. I’d pay for an iOS graffiti keyboard.

FITALY was the best keyboard I found for the Palm. Optimised for 1-pen/finger-input in English language, it was perfect for the single-touch resistive digitiser of the Palm Pilots. Needs a bit of getting used to but then you’re flying with your input. I even recreated this for my SonyEricsson P800 back in the days.

Nice to see such an incredibly long and detailed writeup. Sounds like the 68k environment made a "good enough" VM for most applications.

Wow, the dedication is incredible! I also love how much about emulation and jit and testing I learned and I’m not even halfway.

Ah Dmitry grinberg, now that's a name in the palm world that carried weight. Glad to see him still kicking.

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