Mike writes:
Can someone explain the difference between an ARM native program and a 68K native program?
You don't say what your background is, so it's hard to tell whether this is a simple or a deep question. I'd start by looking up the terms "compiler", "machine code", "assembly language", "instruction set architecture" (ISA), "virtual machine" and "emulation".
The ARM and 68k families have two completely different and incompatible ISA's, which means all the machine code is completely different between the two families. 68k software can only run natively on 68k CPU's (not true actually, as many 68k implementations actually interpret the ISA in hardware microcode), and ARM software can only run natively on ARM architecture systems (ARM7T, ARM9T, XScale, StrongArm, ...)
As far as I understand, according to the "Programming for ARM" PDF, API Calls using the 5.0 SDK are ARM native calls. So what would make a program NOT ARM native? Compiled using the 4.0 SDK?
The only "native" programs on a Tungsten T consist of ARM machine code. Unless your binary happens to be spit out by arm-elf-gcc or the CW v9 armlet compiler, it just 68k code, not ARM native. The SDK is just a wrapper for the OS calls, and has (almost) nothing to do with the ISA used by the binary (ARM, x86/IA32 or 68k). Now, even though Windows and MSDOS programs only run on the the Intel x86/IA32 architecture, you can make it look as if you're running those programs on a Mac (slowly) by using the VirtualPC emulator (a software program that "pretends" to be another kind of hardware). PalmOS 5 only runs on ARM (and IA32) hardware, but the ARM version includes a 68k emulator (PACE), so it looks to the user as if those 68k applications can run just fine. As long as the emulation software "pretends" fast enough to be a CPU that isn't really there, everybody is happy. AFAIK, the only completely ARM native OS 5 application is HotSync, all the others are a mix of emulated 68k wrappers around some percentage of ARM native subroutines. If you're really asking a deeper question, please enlighten... IMHO. YMMV. Ron Nicholson HotPaw <http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw> -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
