Tài liệu The Palm OS Emulator

The Palm OS Emulator (formerly Copilot) is a Windows and
Macintosh application for emulating the execution of ROMs
from Palm Computing devices such as the Pilot 1000, Pilot
5000, PalmPilot, and Palm III. It has a number of features for accurate
emulation of the Palm Computing hardware platform, plus additional
features for debugging Palm OS applications.
The Palm OS Emulator is primarily a developer’s tool, although
anyone can run it. This means you can, for example, play your favorite
Palm OS game right on your Windows or Macintosh desktop.
In The Beginning
The Palm OS Emulator began life as the UN*X Amiga Emulator (UAE),
written by Bernd Schmidt in Germany (www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/).
Both the Commodore Amiga and the Palm devices are based on 680X0
microprocessors, so the CPU emulation source code for UAE was used
as the basis for the Copilot CPU emulation code.
In mid-1996, Greg Hewgill (www.hewgill.com/) started working on
Copilot, using UAE as a starting point. To the core 68000 CPU emulator,
he added support for specific features of the 68328 Dragonball processor
used in Palm devices as well as support for the rest of the hardware.
In September 1996 he released the first beta of Copilot 1.0.
Over time, he added more features to Copilot and more support for
subsequent Palm devices, resulting in Copilot 1.0 b9, released in mid-
1997. [For more details on Greg’s work see “Copilot: Design and Development”
on Page 34. Ed]
Copilot Goes Travelling
Greg was interested in seeing his work benefit as many people as possible,
so in October 1996 he posted the source code on his Web site. His
invitation to others to port Copilot to other platforms and extend his
work was accepted. So far, Copilot has been ported to Macintosh (two
versions), Linux, BeOS, OS/2, and even Windows CE.
Palm Lends A Hand
In December 1997, I left Apple’s Newton group to work for Palm Computing
in their Development Tools group. As the second employee in
this group, there was a lot for me to do. One of these tasks was making
some modifications to Copilot for our upcoming Palm III product. Specifically,
Copilot needed modification to support ROMs larger than 1
MB, grayscale displays, a larger dynamic RAM heap, and the new ways
the Dragonball registers are accessed.
Working from Greg’s 1.0b9 sources and the sources for the
Macintosh version from Illume Software (members.aol.com/illumesoft/
illume.html), these features were quickly added and made available to
our developers (www.palmpilot.com/devzone/index.html).