Old Hardware Emulated : The PalmOS 5 SDK In Action

June 11, 2021

It's Time To Give PalmOS 5 A Run For It's Money!

The PalmOS 5 SDK simulator was released on Windows. I ran it on my IBM Thinkpad T41 running Windows XP. On one hand, the simulator is a very accurate representation of the OS. However, this isn’t a hardware emulator. As such, it can’t run Palm applications compiled for ARM. Applications have to be recompiled in x86 machine code in order to run on the simulator. The simulator can be described as a port of Palm OS 5 to x86 Windows. The PACE environment is implemented in the simulator. As such, the SDK can run PalmOS 1-4 applications as well. However, badly misbehaving applications can crash the simulator as well, like its real-world counterparts.

Application developers were quick to support the new platform. On one hand, the PalmOS 5 software library was much smaller compared to its predecessor. However, Palm OS5 was still very well supported. Applications released in the early up to the late 2000's would bring much value to the platform. There was a constant demand for e-readers. This is where Plucker enters the picture. Plucker is probably the single most important app ever released on Palm. This program is a e-reader, image viewer, and off-line web-browser all in one.

With SD Cards becoming a common fixture for Palm owners, many would regularly download books and store them on there Palms to read on there free time. One could now carry an entire library in there pocket. If one wanted to read Alice In Wonderland on there free time anywhere on demand, that owner now had that option.

For many users, there PDA's became the digital newspaper. Plucker came with a Windows utility that allowed users to craw websites and download there contents into a local file so that the site can be viewed off-line without a internet connect. The webpages were re-formatted in a Palm -friendly format. As discussed previously, there were many online browsers as well. However, many Palms didn't have modems or wireless support. Browsing the web from a handheld was still a novelty at this time in the early-middle 2000's. Even those who did often had restrictive data plans which made web-browsing a expensive proposition. Also, because the earlier Palm devices were quite limited in there hardware capabilities, the Palm wasn't capable of rendering desktop web-pages. For online browsing, the requested webpages were sent to a proxy server which reformatted the pages before sending it to the Palm device.

However, with home internet on desktop PC's proliferating in the early 2000's, it was much cheaper for a Palm owner to simply run the Plucker (or other alternative utilities) to crawl and download the webpages and store them for off-line viewing. These programs acted like a proxy server in that they stripped out the incompatible HTML code and fed a page that could be rendered on a Palm device. As mentioned in previous articles, it helped that most websites (especially news) often had low-graphic versions of there sites which made the final off-line website small enough where it didn't eat away SD card storage.

However, the web was evolving. However, Plucker could handle graphics as well. Even in off-line mode, a Palm user could get an decent web experience with a browser that had full support for hyperlinks and graphics. The new ARM processors meant that those users didn't have a pay a performance penalty for graphics support now.

While the PalmOS 5 software library was much smaller compared to it predecessors, there were was diverse selection of programs for the user to sample. From various educational programs to organizers, calculators, e-readers, image viewers, and file managers, there was a healthy array of programs to populate that new Palm.

However, multimedia was rapidly becoming a thing on the Palm. RealPlayer was released for the new Palm. This brought MP3 support. Programs that supported panoramic images similar to the QuickTime VR were featured on the platform as well. However, with these new features, complaints also came in.

Windows CE and Symbian had native support for GIF and JPG's. How come PalmOS 5 didn't natively support those formats. Windows CE had native support for the AVI video format. How come PalmOS 5 didn't support it as well. One of the selling points of PalmOS 5 was its capabilities to support multimedia hardware. Yet, in order to use multimedia hardware, the user had to install third-party programs to exploit those capabilities. This wasn't the case with Windows CE.

Despite these complaints, many Palm devices from the OEM's and Palm themselves often bundled those third-party programs with there devices. They were fully up to the task, and they delivered. The new PalmOS 5 supported displays running in 16 and 32-bit color depths. This meant that the new hardware made much image viewers compared to there predecessors.

There really wasn't that much to report on the PalmOS game front. Because of the PACE emulator, the vast majority of games that were released for PalmOS 1-4 could run on the new OS without much issue. However, there were many native games as well. Most of these games tend to be either arcade or card games. There were various Tetris and Solitare clones. However, playing these games made me realize that there was a direct linkage between these games of old and there modern smartphone counterparts.