How would you feel in 1979 if someone showed you an Apple ][ that you could carry around with you and that ran on two AA batteries? You'd think it pretty cool, I imagine. What would people say in 1998 if you showed them an Apple ][ emulator that ran on your Psion? Probably "you need to get more hobbies" would be a good guess.

But you don't care! Because now you can be the envy of your enemies, the pity of your friends, the life of the MUD reunion party with PsiApple, the first Apple ][ emulator for Psion Series 5! It emulates an Apple ][+ with 64K and 2 disk drives. The raw CPU benchmark is about 0.92 MHz on the Series 5, but the average speed is typically 0.4-0.8 MHz (depending on what's going on). I've been optimizing the crap out of the CPU emulator, going so far as to declare global register variables (which is quite evil) and even tweaking the assembly code. If anybody has any experience optimizing against the MARM architecture, I'd appreciate some pointers.

The emulator takes standard .dsk or .do disk image files. You'll recognize them because they'll be 143,360 bytes in size.

Use this application at your own risk! Even though EPOC32 is a very robust OS, and you're unlikely to actually lose data if something goes haywire in this app, make sure you have your palmtop backed up at all times!

psiapple.zip (47413 bytes)

Instructions:

1. Make a folder on your C drive: "\SYSTEM\APPS\PSIAPPLE".
2. Copy all the files in the archive (except this one, if you'd rather) into that folder.
3. Enjoy!

The emulator in action. Note the groovy backdrop that heightens the nostalgic aura!