IMO the emulators were a much better idea. They were more portable (i.e., they actually _got_ ported to platforms that aren't Windows), and they carried the bugs of the OS, since the bugs would be in the ROM. Carrying the bugs of the OS is a good thing, because it's the _only_ way you can work around them unless you have the real unit.
Yes, an emulator has a lot of advantages. We're well aware of that.
I hope that PalmSource recognise their mistake and switch back to using emulation. It shouldn't even be particularly hard, since ARM emulators aren't exactly uncommon. The GBA emulator was out maybe a week after the device appeared. GBA emulators now work on every desktop platform. Is it really so hard to do the same for a PDA? Surely not.
We have not made a mistake in emphasizing simulators. That was the only reasonable choice for developing Palm OS Garnet and Palm OS Cobalt.
ARM emulation is very hard. The GBA is a much simpler and slower platform than PDAs. A GBA runs at 16.8MHz with a ARM7-based processor without any special memory mapping hardware. Palm OS PDAs start around 120MHz and go up from there, usually with an ARM9 or better processor core and sophisticated memory hardware.
With the GBA, there is only one hardware platform. Right now, there are at least twelve different ARM-based CPUs running different Palm OS devices or development boards:
Cirrus Logic ARM7-based system TI OMAP 310, 311, 1510, 1600 Intel XScale PXA250, PXA255, PXA270 Freescale iMX1, iMXL, iMX21 Sony Handheld Engine
Not only are the peripheral sets different for each chip, the set of additional hardware, like LCD controllers, input devices, hardware codecs, and memory card slots differ.
So, one Palm OS Emulator for ARM would only be able to handle one particular combination of CPU and associated hardware. At best, we could release an emulator that acted like one of the pre-device development boards that we use here at PalmSource, but wouldn't be able to run actual ROM images from devices that you could buy at the store.
As you can see, we've done a lot of thinking here, and we're continuing to look for ways to solve this problem. However, the hardware platforms are much more sophisticated than the old Dragonball days, there's much more diversity among device types, and with development of devices portioned out among the Palm OS Ready program companies, PalmSource, and the Palm OS licensees, there's no one source of information needed to do a device-specific emulator.
-- Ben Combee, Technical Lead, Developer Services, PalmSource, Inc. "Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/ Developer Fourm Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/
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