PocketMatrix

The complex part of the work seems to be input (via buttons and soft keyboard) and output only (please don't missunderstand the "only"). The emulator itself should be so portable that it's not a real problem. I realy hope that they will figure it out how to solve it. I would pay for a working C64 emu on PPC2002 ...

My respect to every bloke spending spare time to hack some code into these little thingies ...

Well, as project coordinator, I guess I should probably reply...

The project (PocketHobbit as we call it, www.omnytex.com/ph) is not dead, just at a temporary point of inaction.

There are three primary programmers involved, myself, Refractor and Michael Adcock. The bottom line is that all three of us have been tremendously busy with work-related things (like, oh, ummm... WORK!!) and haven't been able to put any time into it for about a month now.

We got the emulation working, we were able to execute some simple Basic programs, so it's basically working. We also did some graphics code to allow both landscape and portrait (with and without borders) which required some filtering code (kudos to Refractor for handling that).

However, for quite a while we had trouble with getting the keyboard code to work. At this point it works, but I only started hacking together some temporary on-screen keyboard code, but it never got finished.

The disk loading code is broke at the moment, and I think the issues alluded to in this thread are accurate. None of us has had time to sift through it and get it working.

So, at this point what we have is a program that runs and that you can flip orientations on-the-fly with (but it isn't 100% working there) and it may or may not work on all devices. If you run this within the desktop emulator you can in fact type in programs and execute them, but you cannot load anything and there is no on-screen keyboard to play with.

In addition, sound code has been written but because of the lack of keyboard and disk loading we have yet to test it.

I also wrote the code to parse a D64 file, so we're more or less ready to write loader code, once the basic disk load functions are complete.

Argh, sounds kinda bad now that I read that back! It comes down to time, nothing more. We don't see any insurmountable problems right now, but until at least one of us has some free time to put into it, it's not going anywhere fast. It'll get done almost certainly, but it could be months away (or days if things break right, who the hell knows?!?)

Certainly not ME, Mr. project coordinator!

(I'm not coordinating anything except messages to say there's nothing to coordinate!)