Thinking of bringing Little John Palm to a new platform!

[palmdoogie]

Hello All,

I'm the person who was working on LJP-Lite several years back. I had it mostly complete including a lite version of Palm MAME integrated. There was just a little more debugging and memory leak plugging needed, but sadly, the Palm platform was already sort of dying even when I started the project and now is pretty much a thing of the past. But I never gave up on the idea of portable light weight emulation. I have plans to port perhaps not all of the LJP code verbatim, but at least the spirit of LJP over to a brand new platform. Here are some of the things I considered:

iOS: Not emulator friendly due to ROM controversy and I didn't want to make something that you'd have to jailbreak your device just to use. Also, touch control for a vintage emulator? Yuk!

I also wanted a lightweight platform that connects to a modern Television via HDMI so….

Rasberry Pi: RetroPi already exists, and I'm not happy with the experience. Why can't a 1MHz Apple IIe be emulated with sound at full speed on a 700-900MHz Arm Cortex A? My 66Mhz Power Macintosh running OS-8 did the job quite handily back in 1994, thank you very much!

Any number of other single board computers adapted for HDMI or small handheld LCDs: Ack! The HDMI capable SBCs all like to have some bulky OS running on them. I prefer bare metal performance for my dedicated emulator running machine. And by the time you stack up shields to get these on a "Portable" 3.5" LCD, the sandwich is ugly and bulky no matter how you 3D printer re-package it!

So…. I'm creating a NEW platform. I'm shooting for an ARM Cortex-M class powered architecture and a fair amount of shared design between the HDMI Set top unit and the 3.5" LCD(or similar) handheld. I'll be developing the hardware custom and designing the PCB myself, so that I can make something Zodiac-esque, although I won't be able to create something as compact as that was. Think of something more like a wide-ish format gameboy only quite a bit slimmer. I plan to have a full size Playstation thumbstick on board, for instance. My biggest complaint on the Zodiac was the very delicate thumbstick. I had some thoughts on making a single device that had both an LCD and an HDMI output. First I want to prove out the architecture and see where I end up. Maybe I can power down the HDMI transmitter chip when the unit is not plugged into a power adapter…

I know this won't much resemble a Palm device and will not be quite as elegant as a Zodiac, since I don't have a 6-7 figure budget for industrial design, but the purpose is to make something semi-homebrew and try to build a community around it. I want to make the platform easier to program for. MUCH easier than the Palm with it's split-personality 68K launcher and Pace Native Object emulators and the parameter handoff voodoo that was required. Also, I want to be more compact and efficient than linux. I basically will build and supply libraries to all of the I/O functions, graphics, USB or BT HID devices(for the TV connected unit) and port a handful of must have emulators to prove out the platform. Then I'd like to see people get excited about expanding even to the point of writing new non-emulator games/programs for the device.

Anyway, I thought I post on here to see if anyone is still out there in the LJP world listening

[coder12]

It's great to see some life in these forums, PalmDoogie; you definitely have my attention!

[marcjj]

It sounds brilliant, i enjoyed many an hour with my zodiac 2 with lip, never had a better emulator experience since.

[palmdoogie]

Not sure if anyone's still listening out there, but I am progressing on a series of ARM Cortex-M based platforms which should be capable enough to run these emulators as well as be a general non-linux light weight generation computing platform. I have three form factors in flight with the intention that all three will have either binary compatibility or at least easy recompile. There will be a hand held unit, an HDMI TV connected unit, and a small "desktop" system with flat panel. First generation hardware will probably be 640x480 resolution, but 800x600 or 1024x768 are on the table for later generations. Eventually, I'll start a blog for this and other gizmos I'm working on.

[coder12]

Still listening, and interested. I'd love to see more about what you're working on!

[palmdoogie]

May 1, 2018 16:11:03 GMT 1 coder12 said:

Still listening, and interested. I'd love to see more about what you're working on!

Hey, it's my most ardent fan! I think we're the only two left on this forum. I'll definitely need to build up a website for the work I'm doing. I'm actually thinking beyond just emulators and am now designing generalized development platforms for embedded systems. I have a design I may start selling later in the year. It's not quite up to the task of running emulators, as it's based off of a 100MHz ARM Cortex-M. However, it's a stepping stone to a family of much higher performance ARM based dev platforms including the ones I described above. These ideas started off as fun emulator platforms, but I've been inspired to make them more general purpose in order to appeal to a larger market. I'll definitely post a link once I have something ready. I'm building off of the ARM MBED ecosystem so that development will be accessible to everyone from novices to professionals.

What kind of coding are you into? Desktop applications, embedded firmware, Maker-type gadgets?

Cheers.

[palmdoogie]

Time for my annual post I'm making inroads with the Cortex-M class processors. At the moment I can drive any number of TFT LCD displays all the way from a tiny 240x240 1.5" up to a 640x480 10.4" panel. I also just recently built a proof of concept HDMI shield. I can do 1280x720p, but I'm probably going to limit the resolution to 480p as the frame buffer and processing requirements for 720p would probably tax the Cortex-M architecture and not perform well. I also have about 80% of an object oriented graphics library written including a way to abstract out the hardware drivers for maximum reuse across platforms. I have another side project of creating an FM sound synthesizer on the Cortex-M, which will provide an object oriented audio class for the platform as well. Once I master that, I'll start working on HID device class stuff for game controllers and that should give me all of the building blocks for making my planned "trio" of classic products: A small desktop, a handheld, and a set top retro-gaming platform all running the same libraries, which will eventually develop into a super light weight operating system. I'm thinking of something more powerful than an RTOS, but much lighter weight than Linux. Once I master the Cortex-M, I'll try and port to the much more powerful Cortex-A class processors as there aren't too many "bare metal" type OSs for that family. I still need to start my own blog for this so I can post pics and progress, but I need to make a bit more progress first.

Cheers.

[coder12]

Time for my annual post! 😂

That sounds pretty cool! How has progress been on it?

[coder12]

If you’re not already, you should get on the PalmDB discord server!