Palm did an interesting thing with the upcoming Pre smartphone: The company scrapped its old operating system and started from scratch. The new webOS is prettier, easier to use, and more focused on modern apps like web browsers than PalmOS.

The problem is, there are more than 30,000 PalmOS apps already out there. And by building a new operating system from the ground up, Palm was kind of telling loyal fans of some of those programs not to bother upgrading until (or unless) the develoeprs of those apps issued updates. Because webOS wasn't going to run them.

But now Palm has announced that MotionApps is developing a program called "Classic" that will allow WebOS users to run older PalmOS apps. The software isn't part of the operating system, and customers will have to buy it separately. But it should be available for purchase as soon as the pre launches.

Because Classic is an emulator, older PalmOS programs won't be able to access the core webOS functions. I assume that means if you decide to that you prefer the classic contact application to the new one, you won't be able to use it to initiate phone calls.

PalmOS emulation company StyleTap has also said that it's considering developing a version of its software for webOS.

[via Uneasy Silence]

While we're still waiting to find out whether StyleTap will bring its PalmOS emulation software to the new Palm Pre, the company has officially launched a utility for Symbian S60 series phones that allows users to run thousands of Palm applications.

The Symbian version of StyleTap has been in closed beta for a few months. The company says the program supports more than 30,000 apps designed to run on PalmOS devices. There's also a version of the program for Windows Mobile phones and PDAs.

StyleTap is available as a 14 day free trial so you can find out whether your favorite Palm apps work. A full license will set you back $49.95, which may seem like a lot of money, but it's much cheaper than purchasing a spare Palm III to carry around in your pocket in addition to your phone.

[via Palm InfoCenter and Symbian Guru]

My four year old son (not me, of course) can't get enough of the monochrome greatness that is our collection of old Gameboy cartridges. The Gameboy, however, has taken a dirt nap and he's had to learn to play them in VirtualBoy on my laptop.

What about newer games? What if your DS happened to get crushed under a truck tire and you were left with a pile of games you couldn't play?

The iDeaS emulator's latest version would be one solution. With the release of v1.0.2.8 frame rates have improved greatly and several bugs have been fixed that make the emu extremely usable.

Of the half dozen roms I tested (all of which I own, of course), I didn't note any major issues. There were a few cutscenes that didn't render fully and some momentary choppiness, but nothing that made the games unplayable.

iDeaS worked nicely on both my systems, one running Vista Home Premium and the other with Ultimate x64.

It's a free download for Windows and should, of course, be used to play only roms of games that you own - not ones that you download from, say, Pirate Bay.

Virtual drive software isn't new, but with the recent surge of ultra portable notebooks that do not have built in optical drives this is a good time to go over one of the free emulation software out there, Slysoft's Virtual CloneDrive.

For those that may not know, a virtual drive emulates a physical drive, in this case an optical drive. This way you can mount a disc image and use it as if a physical disc was inserted into an actual drive.

CloneDrive gives you the ability to mount up to 8 virtual drives at once. Simply right click the virtual drive under My Computer and select the image you would like to mount or just double click the image file itself.

One nice feature of CloneDrive is that it also shows a history of what's been mounted before making it easy to swap out images without the need to browse your computer.

Keep in mind that you will need to convert your CD/DVD to an image format before using CloneDrive. But once you have, loading programs are only a mouse click away.

StyleTap, makers of PalmOS emulation software for Windows Mobile is showing off a video demonstrating their software running on an iPod Touch. The company has made it abundantly clear that there are no plans at this point to release StyleTap for the iPhone/iPod. But you know, they could if they wanted to.

Apple hasn't actually released an SDK for the iPhone yet, so the only way to run third party applications like the one StyleTap is demonstrating would be to hack your iPhone. Since StyleTap is a commercial product, we're going to go out on a limb and assume they wouldn't sell software that requires you to Jailbreak your iPhone. The company would probably wait until after the SDK is released before launching any sort of a product.

In the meantime, StyleTap is working on a version that will run on Symbian phones.

[via Palm InfoCenter]

The Playstation Portable is a jack of all trades. It plays music, videos, browses the Internet, and plays games. However, for an increasing number of people, this still isn't enough. With its powerful dual-processor configuration and Memory Stick Pro Duo slot, the PSP is a pocket powerhouse, capable of much more than just gaming and multimedia.

This is where the homebrew community comes in. With some modifications to its system software, the PSP can run 3rd party software, just like an ordinary computer. A massive community has sprung up online that is dedicated to these modifications. Read on to find out more.

Say you're intensely curious about the stripped down, customized versions of Linux that are running on the tiny laptops like the Asus Eee PC or Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC project, but you don't feel like spending $400 to pick up a new toy that you might never use. As luck would have it, there are (relatively) easy ways to emulate both the OLPC's Sugar OS and the Eee PC's "easy mode" Xandros Linux interface using Ubuntu Linux. You can probably pull off the same feats using different Linux distros as well, but the best tutorials we've found are written for Ubuntu.

Tom Hoffman has posted some pretty simple instructions for running the OLPC's Sugar OS on Ubuntu. Essentially all you need to do is add a repository to your sources.list and install the Sugar emulator. Odds are the display will be too large for your laptop, but you can follow these instructions for changing the resolution.

There are a few more steps involved in getting the Eee PC interface to run on Ubuntu. First off, you'll probably want to have a copy of the DVD that came with the Eee PC, (which sort of defeats the purpose of trying before you buy, but if you've already got an Eee PC you can safely emulate your desktop environment for experimentation purposes). But Asus has posted most of the source files for the Eee PC on its ftp site, so there might be a way to get build the operating system in emulation mode without that disc.

If you're a little more adventurous (and if you read French), it looks like it's also possible to get the Eee PC interface running in Windows using Microsoft Virtual PC software.

[via Hackszine]

Skype's Jaanus Kase obviously has way too much free time on his hands. On a whim, he decided to see if he could get all four versions of Skype (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Mobile) running on one machine.

So he fired up Parallels on his Mac and set up two virtual machines, one to run Linux, the other for Windows. And inside of the Windows machine, he used Microsoft's Device Emulator to load a virtual Windows Mobile device.

The verdict? You can sit around and talk to yourself for hours on end. The Windows Mobile version didn't play as nicely as some of the others, but it's likely that this is because of the emulator rather than the Skype client. After all, we're talking about an emulator running inside of an emulator, on a machine that's running a grand total of four operating systems simultaneously.

Is there any rational reason why you might want to replicate this experiment at home? Of course not. But it's still pretty cool. What other programs can you think of that might be able to run in this environment?

[via Skype Journal]

The fine folks working on the DOSBox cross-platform DOS emulator have released version 0.70. While DOSBox was already pretty capable of running many early PC programs including games like Sam & Max (pictured above running in DOSBox), there's a whole host of updates.

• Faster dynamic CPU core, which means some games run much faster
• Better and more configurable joystick support
• Improve the image and fat drives
• Added null-modem emulation
• Improved CD-ROM detection and support
• Faster screen drawing code
• Support for multiple keyboard layouts
• Dynamic core should work on Intel Macs

If you don't still have a pile of old DOS games lying around, check out Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon which runs great in DOSBox and is available for free. Of course you could also run that old copy of Word for DOS you've got lying around, but what fun would that be?

[via Hackszine]

Thinking about switching from Palm to Windows Mobile, but don't want to give up that one special application you can't do without? Or maybe you're a Windows Mobile user and you desperately want to play the Palm-only role-playing game Edge?

For the past year and a half, the best solution has been StyleTap, a program that allows you to run Palm applications on Windows Mobile devices. Tens of thousands of users tested a public beta version of the software. Recently, StyleTap hit version 1.0, which means a bunch of bug fixes and significantly improved speed and compatibility with most Palm programs.

There are still some programs that won't work, and Styletap only supports resolutions up to 320 x 320 pixels, so you're out of luck if if you have a VGA Windows Mobile device, or if you want to emulate a Palm program that runs at 480 x 320.

StyleTap 1.0 is available for $50, but if you purchased a registration key for the software preview the upgrade is free. There's also a 14 day free trial available.

There's a are lists of Palm OS applications that are reportedly compatible with StyleTap here and here.

I've been having to use VirtualPC (among others) for virtualization for ages, so running an OS inside another OS is pretty old hat for me. But for a lot of folks, the new virtualization tools have really, finally arrived. Let's face it, hardware has finally gotten to a point where doing this kind of stuff isn't nearly as painful as it used to be. I'm not saying it's great, but at least we're moving beyond the point of "which runs faster than a box turtle." Rick Cook has an excellent article at informit.com on hypervisors, from what it does to what it needs and how you can use it. Rick breaks down the major offerings, and talks about what's lacking. This stuff is finally breaking loose, and for a future Intel-based Mac owner, I couldn't be happier.

While everyone knows that DOS programs can be run in any version of Windows in the command prompt, if you've ever tried to play a classic DOS game on your modern system you may have been disappointed.

If you're really intent on getting that classic version of Out of this World (Another World for our European friends) from 1991 working on your Windows XP box (or Mac OS X, Linux or even BeOS machine), check out DOSBox.

DOSBox can emulate 286 & 386 processors in realmode and protected mode, handles extended memory managers like XMS and EMS, emulates a myriad of graphics subsystems including Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, and of course the obligatory SoundBlaster emulation.