Quickies: Palm OS SlingPlayer, GuineaPig, DOS Emu and More

Darn, I see my name so I'd best chime in ;) I've got a number of new freebie/open projects and some ports on the go but I admit I've been quiet of late due both being busy (got a little one coming soon!) and one of my projects not being revealed yet....

As to GuineaPig, it was in fact released back around when the Zodiac came about; it was initially (and hence the name) designed to test how far the DRM went on the device. Since the DRM had potential to prevent homebrew from occuring at all (applications needing the extended graphics hardware API needed to be signed) I built GP as a test to see if a signed application could in turn load shared libs, external ARM objects, and do self-modifying tricks to pass along access to children 'applications', with the blessing of Tapwave. In the end, the public release of GP is just a cheap hack frontend that loads ARMlets from well-defined ARM object files, with the design of doing emualators from a common frontend. ie: It was a menu to list off games from Coleoc, Turbo Grafx, Sega Genesis/MD and other machines, and launch the appropriate ARMlet (PNOlet) to handle 'em. Pretty cool, but only a small piece of its original intention.

GP did really well for a few months, but it was quickly merged/folded/osberved into yoyo's Little John Palm, as they shared the same source for the most part (ie: Both were Palm OS ports of various PC open source emus; GP came first, LJP a little while later.) I was busy with Shadow and other projects, so when yoyo started getting crazy performance out of his work (he pulled in an ARM assembly CPU core for the Genesis emu which was what most people desired at the time, whereas I was using a slower portable C CPU core) then the need for GP slipped; hence LJP took over where GP dropped off.

Industrious folks started pulling in all of GP's modules into LJP; ie: The Atari 2600 module in LJP is ported from GuineaPig for instance. As is the SMS/GG (Mastersystem/Geam gear) module, and others as well.

So over time (years!) GP began, spawned several other projects, and merged/turned-into LJP.

LJP is the superior work, with yoyo kicking it off, but Tinnus doing all the major maintenance over the last year or so.

Long story short -- hit up LJP (Little John Palm) for Palm (or a separate version for Zodiac.. LJZ was quite nifty, though LJP also works for zodiac) and have good times; it has more features than GP ever had, since a number of people put their attention to it :)

(That said, GP is more stable on more devices; its slower in some cases (Genesis, say), but it should work more often since it uses less 'tricks'.. all standard boring Palm OS coding, no magic if I recall; it was a couple years ago though so I forget :)

jeff

While I'm at it; for awhile I was writing most of the emulation stuff on Palm OS, but there are many fine coders championing the scene now. Be sure to look into Chrilith's SCUMMVM port, or MetaViews; MetaView (of PalmPDF fame) also ported UAE (an amiga emulator); others have also ported UAE. Myself, you can still get CaSTaway for Atari ST on Palm OS at my codejedi site; I've got Colecovision and a half dozen other systems covered as well. If you look around, there are a lot of emus now, from a lot of people.. good times for retro-gaming. (We are all assuming you're getting your games legally; do not troll this comment for legal questions; there are other forums to educate people about the legal and less-so aspects. And, finally, yes, emulation is itself 100% _legal_ in every jurisdiction, _period_.)

The Shadow knows!

article #155078
last modified:6/29/2006
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Support for other platforms

Macintosh/OSX support

We don’t have any official announcement yet. Watch for news in the next few months.

Pocket PC support

A Beta version of SlingPlayer MobileTM for Pocket PCs is now available. Please visit www.slingmedia.com/slingbox/slingplayermobile.php to find out more.

Other operating systems

We are currently doing research to determine which software platforms we will port the SlingPlayer to. We have requests for PalmOS, Linux, Unix, and even Commodore 64! While we can't promise the latter, we are definitely looking into supporting other operating systems as soon as possible.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate"