What is this?

This is an emulator for Dragonball-based PalmOS devices that runs in a web browser. In particular, the emulator works on iOS. The emulator is derived from the original POSE emulator. Please see below for the list of currently supported devices.

     

The emulator

The current version of the emulator can be found at

https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/app

The emulator can be added as an app to the homescreen of iOS and Android devices. Please check out the documentation in the app.

ROM files

In order to use the emulator you need to provide a ROM file for the device you want to emulate. You can find a collection of ROMs on PalmDB.

Emulated devices

The following devices are currently emulated:

• Pilot, Palm Pilot
• Palm III
• Palm IIIxe, Palm IIIx, Palm IIIe
• Palm Vx, Palm V
• Palm VII, Palm VII EZ, Palm VIIx
• Palm m500, Palm m505, Palm m515
• Palm m100, Palm m105, Palm m125, Palm m130
• Palm i705
• Tungsten W (silkscreen version)
• Handera 330

Other versions

A preview build of the next version of Cloudpilot is available here.

Reporting issues

Please report issues on the Github tracker.

Known issues

• iOS: changing device orientation between portrait and landscape may mess up the layout of the app. This is an iOS bug that can be worked around by rotating the device by 180° in portrait and rotating back.
• Audio timing is not perfect and processed at the refresh rate of the emulator (usually the same as the screen refresh rate of the host device). Sound effects that rely on quickly modulating the audio signal may not be reproduced correctly.
• Savestates are not endian safe and can not be exchanged between big and little endian systems. As long as there are not big endian system that run Cloudpilot that issue is probably academical :)
• On rare ocassions installing a prc or pdb can catch PalmOS on the wrong foot and crashes the emulator. This is particularly true if a file is installed on a virtual Palm IIIc with PalmOS 3.5 while the launcher is active and the category menu is open.
• Trying to enable mobile on Tungsten W will crash the emulated device.

Source code and relationship to POSE

Cloudpilot is derived from the original POSE sources. It is not a straightforward port, though, as the original code has been adapted and partly rewritten to fit well with a browser environment. In addition, it contains a few bug fixes new features. In particular:

• The codebase has been updated to build and run on both 32bit and 64bit little endian systems. Big endian systems should work, but I cannot test this (are there even any relevant big endian systems left?).
• POSE was built as a tool for debugging and profiling PalmOS applications. Most of this functionality has been removed in Cloudpilot.
• All UI parts and in particular threading were removed from the source.
• Dispatch and timing have been partly rewritten, timing should now be pretty close to the original device.
• Adjusting the grayscale in 2bpp mode works.
• All 16MB of the Palm m515 are usable.
• A few conditions that can cause interrupt storms have been fixed.
• Savestate code has been rewritten to work with a fixed buffer without allocations.
• Event injection works without generating null events.

Building

The build is controlled by src/Makefile. You can tune the compiler and linker options by copying Makefile.local.example to Makefile.local and editing it.

The following instructions apply to Linux and MacOS.

Web app

Emulator

The emulator is written in C++ and compiled to Web Assembly using emscripten. In order to build the WASM binary you need to install a recent version of the emscripten toolchain. Cloudpilot currently builds with 2.0.24.

With the SDK properly set up you can build the source via

    $ make -Csrc emscripten

Javascript

The web app is written in Typescript using Angular and Ionic. In order to build you need NodeJS and yarn installed. Go to the `cloudpilot-ionic" directory and do

    $ yarn install
    $ yarn build --configuration production

The result will be in the www subdir. The build includes a service worker for offline operation. If you don't want the service worker you'll have to delete ngsw-worker.js from the generated bundle before serving it.

Note that you need to build the WASM binary (see above) before building the web app.

Native build

There is a simple native build for debugging Cloudpilot outside the browser. You need SDL2 and a recent version of Boost in order to build. The build is accomplished with

    $ make -Csrc bin

and you will up with a src/cloudpilot binary. The binary takes a ROM file or session image as an argument. There is a rudemtary readline CLI with tab completion that allows you to save session images and reset the virtual device.

Credits

Artwork for Cloudpilot was done by Paolo Lazatin.

SDCTL emulation to enable the full 16MB of RAM on the m515 is taken from Mu.

Zipfile I/O uses the zip library.

Protobuf (de)serialization in C++ is done using the awesome NanoPB library.

The native build uses argparse and arg-parse. Stacktraces in the native build are based on Farooq Melas gist. HTTP and Websocket I/O in the native build is done with Boost.Beast. In addition, the native build uses Boost coroutines and uuid.

LICENSE

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.