Palm Gameboy EMU Update

Posted By: @tomic212 on Sunday, September 26, 1999 12:00:00 AM

Gambit Maven is leaning towards releasing the emulator as it stands - ready to run Tetris. He will also release a DOS utility (which he is currently writing - the main reason why it's not quite ready for release) which will convert a Tetris ROM to a PDB file for the Palm. The emulator will NOT run on any Palm before OS 3.0, due to the fact that the earlier versions had less than the 46kb of Dynamic Memory available to an application which Gambit requires. The Gambit.prc is actually pretty small - currently under 20kb! A release date hasn't been set, but we will have it here as soon as it is announced. See this article for more on Gambit, as always leave any comments below.

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Article Comments
19 total comments

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Palm Pilot Compatability

chris@brazier1.screaming.net @ 9/26/1999 2:01:30 PM #

What about owners of Palm Professionals who run OS 2.x?

Does anybody know where to get the IR + OS 3.x upgrade is for the Palm Pilot Pro?

Chris Brazier (chris@brazier1.screaming.net)

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

I.M. Anonymous @ 9/26/1999 8:05:47 PM #

Well, it says right there in the main article that ANYTHING BEFORE OS 3.0 WILL NOT WORK. I'd have to assume that that includes OS 2.0...

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

Maven @ 9/26/1999 9:54:55 PM #

I myself own a PalmPilot upgraded to Palm Professional which I can't run Gambit on. It's an unfortunate limitation built into the OS, which was eased somewhat in the OS 3.0 I wish I could make it run on those, but I'd have to get rid of direct memory access, and the whole thing would be 4x slower! Anyway, I figure it's time for me to upgrade to a Visor. It runs just fine on there.

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

Aaon Ardiri @ 9/27/1999 6:09:19 AM #

Maven,

i assume your "46Kb" limitation is due to the
fact that you must load the application into
memory? Have you tried mapping a memory location
to the file actually stored on the palms?

You should really be streaming the data from
the ROM images - and this would remove the limitation.

// az
ardiri@hig.se
http://www.hig.se/~ardiri

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

Maven @ 9/27/1999 8:08:44 AM #

Aaron,
I'm reading the ROM directly from a file, but I also require 32kB for the Gameboys RAM and of course there's the memory for the greyscale screen (double-buffered)

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

Maven @ 9/27/1999 8:08:44 AM #

Aaron,
I'm reading the ROM directly from a file, but I also require 32kB for the Gameboys RAM and of course there's the memory for the greyscale screen (double-buffered)

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

I.M. Anonymous @ 9/28/1999 11:19:38 AM #

What actually happens if you run it on OS 2.0.5? Does it just run slower? Would overclocking the Palm to 21MHz help? Mavin, relase a version that is 4x slower and I would still use it (after over-clocking)

RE: Palm Pilot Compatability

Aaron Ardiri @ 9/28/1999 12:43:55 PM #

Maven
ouch... :) - it is a pity that you have to load
the ram.. surely you can create a memory mapped
file to do this tho? (instead of using the heap)?
// az

ardiri@hig.se

http://www.hig.se/~ardiri

its cool

I.M. Anonymous @ 9/27/1999 3:40:59 AM #

Trust me,this thing is NOT vaporware.it runs on my palm3.maven has given me a copy to test for him and i must say,it works great and it jumps that irritating nintendo popup when started.
sorry folks...absolutely no sound though...but still cool...

RE: its cool

kappy @ 9/27/1999 5:49:29 PM #

I'm wondering if you can have more than 1 rom on the pilot and choose from a list?
Do you need to over-clock the palm III? I hope that maven can emulate the sound that would be awsome.
Maven, have you looked at emulating the savegame? For example,
Zelda - Links Awakening and Metroid II are two of my fave games and they require you to save
your progress (cause the games are so long). Does Gambit ONLY run Tetris?

GameboyEmu available, but not Gambit.

thesmiler @ 9/28/1999 2:59:08 AM #

Hi !
I today saw on Palmgear that there is GameboyEMU 0.001 by Konstantin Klyatskin. Well, I think that's an alternative project we all didn't know from. I couldn't test it yet, but he says it's way to slow, and doesn't include a file to convert into pdb either. Another limitation is that you need OS 3.1+.
So I think we'll better wait for Mavens emu. Sounds more interesting.

RE: GameboyEmu available, but not Gambit.

Maven @ 9/28/1999 8:57:56 AM #

I saw that emulator yesterday, and I played with it a little bit. If we ever get MUCH faster pocessors in our palms, it aught to work pretty good. Wouldn't take much to write a program for it to convert the ROMs. Unfortunately, I can tell you from experiance, there's no way he's going to get the kind of speed up he needs without completely re-writing the thing. There is 0 tolerance for any inefficiency in the Palms 16MHz speed. Anyway, I hope he keeps working on it... there's room for more than one emulator!
Maven

RE: GameboyEmu available, but not Gambit.

Martin @ 9/28/1999 9:50:00 AM #

Hi! I saw the new Gameboy Emulator by Konstantin Klyatskin too and of course download it at once.
BUT I simply didn't get through it. Because of the several warnings I tried it on my PC Palm Emulator not to crash my Palm IIIx and what is it.
I can only guess: It looks like a meteor or something like that going down very very very slowly.
I mean where's the game? Did something exiciting happened when you tried the Gameboy. Is it some kind of game or what.
But there's still some hope .... Maven

RE: GameboyEmu available, but not Gambit.

Maven @ 9/28/1999 10:22:02 AM #

Actually, its a common demo often distributed with Gameboy emulators. It doesn't "play" any game, just shows a world and gameboy against a starry background.

Visor

I.M. Anonymous @ 9/28/1999 9:57:15 PM #

Will the so-called 20% speed increase in the Visor make a difference with this emulator? It is the exact same chip, right, so i don't really see how. I don't recall if the improvement is from actually optimizing the processor in some way or just the Palm operating system so that is 'feels' 20% faster.

RE: Visor

@tomic212 @ 9/28/1999 10:42:22 PM #

The Visor is so called faster because they disabled the wait states in the OS. You can get an app that will do this and you will see noticeable speed increases. And it safe too because the Visor is shiping with them disabled.

RE: Visor

rick @ 10/1/1999 3:58:49 PM #

where do you get this app for palm 3

Overclocking the PalmPilot for Gambit

I.M. Anonymous @ 10/1/1999 2:58:44 PM #

It should be possible to squeeze a little extra speed out of the PalmPilot much the same way those hacks do by increasing the clock speed. Has this been considered?

Anything

Martin @ 10/9/1999 5:34:56 AM #

Hey, is there anything new about gambit? What's the matter, no new comments since 10/1/99?

Palm Software on sale