Tài liệu Copilot: Design and Development

My goal was to emulate, with no documentation except the
Motorola Dragonball reference manual, what was then
known as the Pilot. The Pilot was a handheld device with a
68000-based CPU, an LCD touch screen, 512 KB of ROM, a serial port,
and various hardware buttons. I was going to try to emulate it in software.
To tell this story properly, I must start at the beginning.
Discovering the Pilot
My first encounter with a Pilot was when I saw one on a coworker’s desk
sometime in June 1996. He described it to me as “just like a Newton,
only smaller.” He showed me the basics of the Graffiti writing style and
handed me the Pilot and the Graffiti reference card. I was hooked. A few
days later I purchased a Pilot 5000 from a local retailer and, being a software
developer, I started looking for information on how to write my
own programs for this little gem.
I was encouraged by the amount of developer information on the
Pilot web site, but I couldn’t find the Windows tools. All I found was the
Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Pilot package, which only ran on the
Macintosh. I didn’t have a Macintosh. So I bought the only thing that
worked with Windows: The Conduit Software Development Kit for
Windows. (I still haven’t tried to actually write a conduit.)
Fortunately, there was at least one other developer out there who
had a Pilot but no Macintosh. Darrin Massena (<a class="__cf_email__" href="http://www.cloudflare.com/email-protection" data-cfemail="90f4f1e2e2f9fed0fdf1e3e3f5fef1bef3fffd">[email protected]<script type="text/javascript">
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)
had a Web site (www.massena.com/darrin/pilot/) and wrote a piece of
software best described as a “discovery tool.” PilotHack is its name; it’s a
monitor for computers where operating systems are optional. PilotHack
shows you every single byte of the RAM and ROM in hex and ASCII. It
still resides on my Pilot today.
Darrin managed to put together some small Pilot applications using
Microsoft’s Visual C++ 4.0 Cross-Development Edition for Macintosh.
With a serious amount of tweaking, the compiler generated application
images that the Pilot loaded. He also put together PILA, the PILot Assembler.
PILA ran on Windows and created Pilot application images
from 68000 assembly code.
Finally, Darrin wrote the article “Writing Pilot Applications Under
Windows,” which described what a state-of-the-art Windows SDK for
Pilot would look like. This SDK included an editor, a compiler, an assembler,
a resource editor, a linker, project management, a debugger, an
emulator, samples, OS header files, documentation, on-line help, and a
Windows-based IDE to integrate all the pieces together. Realizing that it
was not possible for a single developer to do all this, he put out a call to
other developers for support.
When I read Darrin’s list, I couldn’t help but be drawn toward the
emulator project. After all, I had some experience with emulators (I had
written an Apple ][+ emulator in the past), I knew some 68000 assembly
language, and the potential hack value if the project was successful
was just too great to pass up.