Arm And Zaurus Software Emulator, ARM and Zaurus Software Emulator Options

[Mark]

Hi everyone!

I've been working in stealth mode on a software emulator for the ARM architecture. It runs on a PC (Linux only at present) and emulates the system features of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 platform. Currently I am able to run bare machine programs, vanilla Linux kernels, and OpenZaurus SL-5500 distributions. The emulator uses some fairly sophisticated simulation techniques so performance is very good. I am close to a real-time simulation of the SL-5500 on a fairly ordinary 2.6 GHz Pentium 4. It does a pretty good job with Zaurus Pacman for example!

The emulator will be a commercial product, and I'm looking for volunteers for the beta test program. If you are interested, please check out the details over at http://www.virtera.com and become a site member if you'd like to give it a try. You will need to have access to an x86 Linux machine with a supported distro, and have some familiarity with installing from RPM, building Linux kernels and installing OpenZaurus to get started.

Look forward to hearing from you! Cheers,

Mark.

[speculatrix]

anyone interested should download it ASAP as it looks as if virtera is stopping this product... a great shame, I am wondering why they couldn't do a version to allow pocketPC developers and palm developers to work on a virtual device.

[RickHodgin]

anyone interested should download it ASAP as it looks as if virtera is stopping this product... a great shame, I am wondering why they couldn't do a version to allow pocketPC developers and palm developers to work on a virtual device.

I had offered to Mark and his company to write the full Windows port for free, including a full debugging suite with custom ports to read/write to any value in memory. I did not need source code access to his product, just runtime-level access with a working API. I was willing to give him and his company the source code of my product, as well as sign over all rights to the project for any and all purposes. He flatly refused to agree, even becoming rude to me at the end when I asked him if he realized what I was giving him.

At the time, I had told many of my co-workers about it, and they could not understand his reasoning. There must've been some real reason why he shut it down. I wished he hadn't, as I'm still many years later without a good emulator.

[Mark]

I had offered to Mark and his company to write the full Windows port for free, including a full debugging suite with custom ports to read/write to any value in memory. I did not need source code access to his product, just runtime-level access with a working API. I was willing to give him and his company the source code of my product, as well as sign over all rights to the project for any and all purposes. He flatly refused to agree, even becoming rude to me at the end when I asked him if he realized what I was giving him.

At the time, I had told many of my co-workers about it, and they could not understand his reasoning. There must've been some real reason why he shut it down. I wished he hadn't, as I'm still many years later without a good emulator.

Hi Rick,

Good to hear from you again!

I'm sorry if I was rude in my email correspondence to you. I took your offer very seriously and read all of the details in all your emails. Perhaps the rudeness was in my last email in August 2005, were I said that this was my final decision. Apologies for that. I never had any interest in selling shrink-wrapped software. The end-game was to sell the IP, services and maybe the entire company. I wanted a few very large deals (maybe only one), not selling units of software at $50 a go.

In the end, there were good reasons for shutting it down and I can tell you some of the back story now. Firstly, I was the *only* person working on the software. I also had a very demanding full-time day job, so all Virtera development was done outside regular hours in my spare time. There were many late nights. The idea was to get a working product and make some big deals before quitting the day job. I never reached critical mass, never took a single dime of revenue, and never got to the point where I could make this my full-time occupation.

There were two events that finally made me throw in the towel. The first was the birth of my daughter in September 2005, literally the week after our final email. Any spare time that I had quickly disappeared! The second was that I had re-targeted the technology to be an iPod emulator. I had a near complete emulation of the 1st and 2nd generation iPods sufficient to run iPod Linux and play audio in real-time. I made some efforts to market this, but had to abandon this because of legal concerns. The final straw was when one of my target companies (the micro-processor chip supplier to Apple) lost the iPod contract and completely lost interest - they were acquired by nVidia in the end.

I thought about open sourcing the whole thing, but didn't go through with that because of the potential legal issues.

Anyway, hope things worked out for you. It sounds like QEMU is the way to go these days.

Cheers,

Mark.