I’m writing an update for a week and change, since this is my first update!
At the top of my mind has been the proposal. We received great feedback on our abstract, and this led us to focus our problem statement and update our design. Ultimately, we were able to improve in areas we were given feedback and in areas we personally found weak. I presented, and planned for the points I wanted to hit — especially in making it clear to a student audience, most of whom have not used PDAs, why they’d care — and for the questions I expected to come up.
Slightly ahead of schedule, I’ve been exploring the M68k ISA and laying out the foundation for an emulator. I expect a large part of the challenge in running PalmOS apps will be understanding what assumptions they make: it would be costly to replicate every platform quirk, but insufficient to throw timing and other observable-but-flexible behaviors to the wind. Therefore, I want to understand what we’re looking at early.
As an aside: we’d like to improve upon processor speed if possible, to open the ecosystem to new capabilities. If PalmOS or particular apps depend on timing behavior, we might not be able to do this. We will find out!
This week, I’m working on the device housing design, and looking ahead to the emulator. While the deadlines are relatively lax (as the next critical dependency is ordering our PCB), this will account for software needing more time than expected.