Palm OS Emulator News Roundup

There has been lots of activity lately for video game emulation on the PalmOS 5 platform. Chris Hurley brings us news of new improvements to PalmMAME, ZodMAME, FrodoZ (a C64 emu), and Little John Palm OS a multi-system emulator which emulates the following systems: NES, SNES, Gameboy and GBC, NeoGeo Pocket, the Sega Master System and Sega GameGear.

PalmMAME
As mentioned previously on PIC, a port of the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, PalmMAME was recently released. MAME is an open source multiple arcade machine emulator that runs hundreds of classic arcade games. It has been updated recently with screen scaling and improved sound and works quite well on faster ARM palms. PalmMAME is available here. (the newest version is linked inside the discussion area- the front page may have a link to an older version).

The ZodMAME fork/port of PalmMAME gives Tapwave Zodiac owners dramatic performance improvements over PalmMAME, thanks to heavy optimizations for the ATI Imageon video chip. Although the Zodiac has a slower processor than many newer Palms, these optimizations makes most games significantly faster under ZodMame than they are on a T3 under PalmMAME. Sound is also much improved. Although not all of the games that PalmMAME supports are supported by ZodMAME, the two co-exist on the same device quite peacefully.

Zodiac owners can also check out the FrodoZ Commodore-64 Emulator.

Little John Palm OS
Last but not least, LittleJohn for Palm OS (and Zodiac) devices is nearing a 1.0 release, with two release candidates appearing recently. LJP includes emulation modules for a variety of home systems, including the recent addition of GameGear, SMS and Atari VCS consoles.

While LJP can be unstable in some cases, it packs a lot of emulation punch into one download. Zodiac owners will appreciate that LJP is now almost as good as its ancestor LJZ in some ways and better in others. Its not quite time to delete LJZ, but LJP is finally worth a try for Zodiac users.

Thanks to Chris Hurley for the news