pda opinions?...anyone???

[twotone8]

broke my tungsten e2 after three years of constant use

rip and all that

now i got about a $250 budget give or take to get another pda

to my absolute surprise, palm hasn't released anything neat or new pda wise in about three years. what's the deal! i don't want to get another e2, i want a bit of an upgrade

am thinking about a tx, or a lifedrive. which is better, for ljp or just in general. it seems like they're remarkably similar except the lifedrive has a hard drive.

and i'm not completely adverse to the idea of getting a non-palm pda if there's one that screams to be owned. i don't want a smart phone, but a nice pda with a lot of functionality, even if that would mean getting a pocket pc and downloading competing emulators. (gasp)



any reccomendations? palm tx, lifedrive, or whatever else? maybe an ipaq or somethinng.

[cristo56]

take a zodiac on ebay or a treo680, or 755, ljp work on it perfectly, and change about discussion on ljp and move to general discussion in the forum.

[semi]

I think another topic we have in the forum, someone was talking about that LifeDrive is slow, and TX doesn't have enough memory to get LJP going really... so they are not a very good choice if you want to play LJP on your PDA.

I don't know much about the new PalmOne PDAs because I think they don't have anything that's really neat like you said, I'd go for the Treo but they don't have 480x320 screens so it'll disappoint me if I want to watch videos.

I don't use any PocketPC because for me personally, I think they are less user friendly.

I am still using the SONY Clie NX80V (You might say "What? that's old stuff, not enough memory!", but it does have enough dynamic memory to run all the SNES games that I have downloaded, so far it hasen't give me any error in LJP saying not enough memory, and it doesn't require any program like MemUnfragment or UDMH, and with overclock, I can play SNES and SEGA Genisis games just fine with frame skip to auto, some games still lag a bit, but really playable)

The NX80V have 16MB storage memory that you can use, and 7.3MB of dynamic memory which, like I said above, can play all the games I have without any special program like UDMH, it's also got 1.3 MegaPixel camera on it which I think the quality is even better than the Palm's 1.3 MegaPixel camera, the best part for this PDA is that the game controller (Sony PEGA GC10) works well with LJP!, on my NX80V, with PXAClocker, the best speed I can get is 484 Mhz, the only problem with NX80V is probably the battery life, with its standard 1200 mAh capacity, it will probably last a little over 2 and a half hour with lowest brightness under 484 Mhz, I have bought a 1400 mAh battery from eBay and is now using it, but haven't had a good chance to really test the life of the battery under heavy use.

One thing I almost forget to mention is the sound quality (on earphone etc...), it will sound better than Palm PDAs.

In any case, with around $50~$150+ you can definately get a used NX80V that's still in very good shape on eBay.

It's really your choice, and all I am saying is just my experience with my NX80V, and just for more information, the down part about NX80V is...

1 - Battery Life
2 - Camera (Some people reported the camera stops working after 1 year+ of use, mine's 3~4 years old now but still working perfectly, so it's just luck maybe..)
3 - Power Slide Button (Bad design, constant use it might break, but with a program called Default Capture, you can change power button to the camera's Capture Button)
4 - Repair (Yes, since SONY quit the whole PDA market, it might be hard to get a repair, but I know this guy named Chris Short who repair this model, and quite well too, in fact I had my NX80V repaired by him, most the time it should be cheaper than SONY depending on what's broken... but just an FYI, SONY here in Canada charge $50 on labour fee, $20 on the power slide button itself, and this guy repaired a battery problem, power button, and a broken electronic cable for me for $75 USD and plus shipping fee which I think is around $5~$10 USD, I think it's worth it.)

[Tinnus]

I don't have any problems with my LifeDrive and LJP. The only thing about the LifeDrive is that it takes 1 minute to boot ;D (soft reset)

[_Em]

I don't have any problems with my TX and LJP. Only issue is that sometimes I have to do a fresh reset before running LJP to play larger SNES games.

[tgwaste]

treo 680 all the way!

[twotone8]

just bought a tx and man does it work great

i was intimidated that the readme for ljp included me having to download all sorts of complicated programs and such, but all i needed was udmh to get snes to work nearly perfectly.

i have two questions

would snes games run BETTER if i downloaded all those other programs like dbcache, etc or whatever they're called? or are they used on other machines simply to get the games running and that's it. i know they run, do i need to do anything else?

also, why does snes run so much smoother and faster than genesis. i thought that snes was a more difficult system to emulate. also, the sound doesn't work very well at all with genesis. it sort of works with z80, but i have to select that specifically and even then the sound doesn't work very well.

great work on this project. i look forward to playing me some snes.

[semi]

Run better with dbcache? I doubt it... as you would probably know, when you're talking about emulation, it's CPU speed that makes the most difference, so if your TX can be overclocked, you can try overclock the CPU to make games run even more smoother and faster, maybe even run games smoothly with FAST video smooth turned on (But then again, overclocking the CPU drains the battery faster)

TX has a PXA270 CPU that runs at 312Mhz default speed, and I think it supports 2D/3D better than my Clie NX80V which has a PXA263 CPU, so with some overclocking, it should be able to run any game without any problem.

In Genesis vs SNES case, I always thought SNES take less resource than Genesis, so when I see Genesis run slower, I wasn't surprised... but I assume that's why there's the "Fast" option for Genesis, but it doesn't work for me at all, I don't get any sound as long as Fast is enabled, I have to use ZX80 only.

[metaview]

SNES and Genesis needs quite a lot of RAM to run: an empty DBCache and UDMH are necessary on a TX.