12.12.2010 13:32
ZX emulators on HP Jornada 720
There are many ZX Spectrum emulators declaring they can be run on WinCE etc. Which of them is working on HP Jornada 720 (HPC2000 alias WinCE 3.01)? Here is a summary of what I have found so far.
Best source for emulator list is WoS.
There are
- Sinclair Spectrum Emulator from Palmtop Software alias today TomTom (but it is not selling this emulator anymore). It's development was abandoned in 2000. This is the only emulator, that I am able to start on Jornada 720, it is able to load Z80 snapshots and plays OK, however, for some reason in this emulator, there is not working a key "O" and I am not able to type any kind of quotes, semicolons etc. There are no extended keys like CAPS SHIFT or SYMBOL SHIFT working. Therefore this emulator can not be used for any reasonable work. You also can not load any .tap program, as you need to type LOAD "", which is impossible. I did not found any documentation for this emulator, except the included help, which is really brief.
- PocketClive release 2B is requiring GAPI (kind of DirectX for WinCE) to work, however it has hard coded 320x240 screen resolution and is not able to work correctly on Jornadas' 640x240 screen size. You may rotate the screen thru GAPI by 90deg. and you may get the welcome screen of Pocket Clive, but that's all. No further action can be taken.
- SpectrumAnyWhere - I was not able to find a CAB file for this emulator, the only way is to install it thru ActiveSync. After a painful install thru ActiveSync, when you start the emulator, you'll receive a message that "You need a 320x240 screen resolution or better with 16bit color depth." Which is Jornada 720 fulfilling however after you press OK, the emulator quits. You are done.
- PocketSpeccy and UnrealSpeccyPPC both require WinCE 4.2. PocketSpeccy needs also GAPI. I managed both application to run by faking the aygshell, coredll and rewriting of the required system version in the .exe. UnrealSpeccy however always quits after setup. PocketSpeccy runs with GAPI default J710 setup, but is somehow too small, and is very slow. Also there are some problems with keyboard layouts, as it is not designed for J720 hw keyboard. There is a config file for a keyboard, that may help to fix the issues, but I did not try that.
I can play in a jornada 680 with SNA,TAP AND Z80 files even in 128 kb games and with pokes, with the fist one. the only problem its: doesnt work “o” caracther.