ALTERNATIVE HANDHELD EMULATION

Console Tapwave Zodiac

Name P UAE

Description Amiga Emu for Zodiac

Author/Homepage Sinisa

Screenshot

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Information

Create directories on the memory card:
1. /PALM/Programs/Palmiga
2. /PALM/Programs/Palmiga/kick
I will change the name Palmiga to PalmUAE any time soon. Anyway, put uae.bin in the
first one, and kickstart file to the other one. Rename your kickstart to kick31.rom .
Put the floppies in the first one (where uae.bin is). I will probably change that too.
Change the floppy name to D1.adf, and if there are more, name them D2.adf, D3.adf ...
up to D0.adf. There is no GUI during emulation, so you will have to change floppies
by tapping on arrows.
Now start PalmUAE and wait a few seconds. Choose your settings. You can skip chipset
settings, I didn't implement it yet. Memory settings are not there yet, it uses default
512K chip+ 1MB fast RAM. There is no sound support yet, and it's not on the top of the
priority list. Interrupts are also not fully covered, so some games that rely on audio
sync might not work. I'm hoping to have this by the end of the year.
Click GO! and again wait a few seconds. It's loading kickstart/floppy from the memory
card to storage RAM. Oh' did I mention that you need ~2.8 MB of storage RAM free?
When you enter emulation, you will see familiar LEDs near the bottom of the screen.
There are four floppy LEDs, although only one is supported by now. For every additional
floppy you would have to have ~900kb od storage free. I have only 11 MB on my TG50, and
I can't afford it.
There are predefined keys, but I'm planning to have a custom key setup in the future.
If you have Clie TG50 like me, or simmilar, you will have the benefit of having most of
the AMIGA keys covered. If you have record button, good for you: you can save floppies
to memory stick. As I previously mentioned, floppies are loaded into storage RAM, and
if you save some game, it is only saved to RAM, not to the adf file. With record button
you can save it from RAM to memory card. I will add the button at the button of the screen
soon for that.
Well, since Palm devices have screen width of 320, you don't have place form border.
Unfortunately, not all the programs start at the same coordinates, so you have to do
centering manually for now. There are two arrows at the bottom left of the screen ment
for that. You will also have tom move the mouse up-down in order to get the whole screen
to update.
At the bottom right there are two more arrows for tapping. Use them to change floppies.
Left one will change, for example, from D2.adf to D1.adf, from D0.adf to D9.adf. The right
one does it in the oppositedirection (D1->D2 ... D8->D9 .. D9->D0 .. D0->D1, circular).
It takes a few seconds for the AMIGA to realise that the floppy has changed, so if you
need to change from D1 to D4, just tap 3 times without stopping, otherwise it will load
each floppy inbetween.
To speed up the emulation I write to video RAM directly. I use the method that Castaway
author used. He mentioned to me that this method does not work on one or two devices.
To exit emulation you need to have the button "back". If you don't you will have to
soft reset. Sorry, I forgot to map some more convenient key. You anyway HAVE to soft reset
after exit because memory allocated with MemChunkNew is not released properly.
You will notice that AMIGA mouse and pen does not have the same speed. That's because
all programs does not use the same mouse scroll speed. I't might be annoying at the start,
but you get used to it.
I didn't have any lock-ups lately, and I'm testing it extensively, but I have no idea
how it will perform on other devices. So, if you want to try it, BACKUP FIRST!
Requirements:
Device with 320*320 or 320*480 display
16bit color
PalmOS 5 or greater.
At least 200 Mhz processor
4MB heap RAM.
2.8 MB storage RAM.
The requirements tend to change for later releases (Only RAM requirements).