Questions About Possible Upgrade To A Newer Zaurus

[mscdex]

I recently bought a SL-5600 off ebay after seeing all the applications and whatnot available for the Zaurus, so i'm a Zaurus newbie. I also bought it because I was fed up with HP when they renigged on their promise of an OS upgrade for my old iPaq.

So anyway, I just got my zaurus in the mail the other day and started browsing around for software to install on it. One thing I liked to do on my old iPaq was play NES games and the like. I looked around for nes emulators compatible with the 5600, and found only 1 that worked (znester + zemufe). However, from what I read it doesn't seem like it is possible to map the nes buttons to the d-pad and surrounding non-keyboard buttons on the zaurus. Also I couldn't figure out how to make the screen show up in portrait mode.

This and other things I've found out in the few days I've had my Zaurus, I'm wondering if I should upgrade to a newer (and unfortunately much more expensive) Zaurus. I am specifically looking at the C1000. Although I have a few questions:

1. How good is battery life with the C1000? I did buy the (older) Socket CF wireless lan card to help with battery life.

2. What ROMs are available now that work well and are stable on the C1000?

3. The software I'd like to run on the C1000 would be something like: a ICQ client and NES emulator (among other small utilities and whatnot). Do decent GUI-based ICQ clients and NES emulators exist for the C1000?


That's all I can think of right now. Any help given is greatly appreciated

[Cresho]

nes is easily played on the c1000 as well as snes

icq is nill from my point of view but i have seen few softwares for it.  I havent tried them though.

[scheck.r]

I think you won't regret buying the SL-C1000.
VGA Display, very good battery life (1800mAh), USB host and client, 128Mb flash.
It's relatively cheap compared to the 3100, so that there is large user base. A couple of developpers bought it too. For example, Mavlovsky who will soon release the new Cacko ROM(a matter of weeks), CoreDump who released the Hentges ROM (a well tuned OZ-Opie ROM especially for the C1000), the PdaXrom team have a few C1000 also.

1. How good is battery life with the C1000? I did buy the (older) Socket CF wireless lan card to help with battery life.

Very good battery life and your WiFi is well supported in all ROM

2. What ROMs are available now that work well and are stable on the C1000?

OZ-Opie, PdaXrom, very soon CackoROM, and obviously SharpROM

3. The software I'd like to run on the C1000 would be something like: a ICQ client and NES emulator (among other small utilities and whatnot). Do decent GUI-based ICQ clients and NES emulators exist for the C1000?

I've tried NES emulator on a SL-6000L, it was working great, never tried on the C1000 but I don't see any problem why it shouldn't.
There are instant messaging software working for each ROM: from memory gaim(quoted from the cacko feed for C7xx: A multi-protocol instant messenger client,
 supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, IRC, Zephyr,
 Gadu-Gadu, Napster, and Trepia) is available for SharpROM and HentgesROM, xchat is available for PdaXrom, and probably other packages like irc, qazoo, ...