Re: What specs would your Apple ][ clone have today?

[Tristan Mumford <xtristan.xmumford@xgmail.xcom>]

David Schmenk wrote:

> Tristan Mumford wrote:
>> David Schmenk wrote:
>> 
>>> sicklittlemonkey wrote:
>> -snip-
>>> Actually, PalmApple was a port of YAE.  It sort of worked, but took
>>> about 30 minutes to boot ProDOS.  Yours truly wrote Appalm (a much more
>>> clever name that PalmApple, I thought) in 68000 assembly and a little C.
>>> The only thing used from YAE was the disk nibblezation and arm stepping
>>> logic.
>> 
>> Oh I see. I misunderstood the lineage. From what I read I thought that
>> Appalm was a later iteration of PalmApple.
>> 
> 
> I sort of hijacked the project from Hilary.  He did a good job of
> getting something to actually run on the Palm.  It was much easier to
> get my code working by replacing PalmApple in sections.  I didn't mean
> to suggest that Hilary hadn't done lots of work on PalmApple.  Many of
> the hard PalmOS interfacing problems were solved in PalmApple. Without
> it, Appalm would never have happened.

But it has happened, and I'm glad. My only wish for it though is VFS
support. There are two reasons for this. Converting is a bit hard for me on
a non-ms system (even a palm app to do it would be okay)
I also try to keep my Palm's RAM as empty as possible. That's because I'm an
evil person that uses programs that need massive amounts of heap etc. We're
talking at least 10MB.
I still think it's a great idea though. I love using emulators on my Palm.

> 
>> You wrote that? Very nice. Mind you I do tend to make a backup of my palm
>> before I use it. It has a tendency to explode on my T3, but the T3 is
>> great for upsetting some programs anyway.
>> 
> 
> Mostly due to allocating a linear 64K chunk of memory and then turning
> off the minimal memory protection mechanism.
That explains a lot.

> And the fact that PalmOS 
> is a cobbled together piece of crap.

The 68k versions did what they were required to do quite well. One of the
reasons I stuck with Palm was the way the OS works. I like the concept of a
RAM filing system. I also like the instant start/returning to apps.
I recall reading something about the older palmOSes multitasking ability.
Something about the company that developed the OS for palm putting in as a
part of the contract that the multitasking APIs aren't exposed.
It seemed a bit odd to me. Either it was shamefully bad or they had plans to
exclusively release backgroundable apps or something like that.


However I fail to understand the logic behind OS5.
I mean what's the point of developing a powerful handheld and essentially
using an emulator for it's OS?
Adding support for 68k based palm apps was a good idea no matter what, but
it shouldn't have been an almost impossible to work with default.

One of the many reasons i kind of wish that I could get linux working on my
palm, and that it was mature enough for everyday use.

> 
>>> Now this is where I think an Apple II clone would get interesting.  My
>>> Treo 700 runs Appalm close to native speed of a real Apple II.  Appalm
>>> has no speed regulation and just runs flat out.  So here is an XScale at
>>> 312 MHz, emulating a 68000, emulating a 6502.  At about the right speed.
>> 
>> Well, I guess you could always rewrite the core in ARM assembly. Or just
>> do the "easy" thing and compile a C based 6502 core as an ARMlet. That
>> would probably give a massive performance boost, removing the 68k
>> middleman.
>> 
> 
> But then I'd have to implement some sort of speed control :-)

Excuses, Excuses :) It's a shame the Palm's internal timer functions are too
coarse-grained. Otherwise it could have a little nap between cycles and
save a bit of battery power.

Tristan.

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