Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Pittsford,NY,USA
Posts: 223

I was just researching the Motorola processor used in the Palm and Visor PDAs. (The DragonBallEZ - Part# MC68EZ328)
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<LI>This processor has an integrated LCD controller capable of driving a 16 shades of gray display with up to 320x240 resolution.
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I searched the Motorola web site for quite awhile and I couldn't find any processor in the same family that could support color. I wonder if Palm is considering a new processor in order to offer color support in the future? If so, I doubt they could offer 100% backwards compatibility. I realize this isn't a developers site, but I was wondering if anyone had heard anymore about color support in the PalmOS and how they were going to do it.

-Eric

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: VA, USA
Posts: 27

The DragonBall EZ is a CPU32 product, so any 68010, 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060 or variant can execute Palm application code, and the OS with little modifaction. The ColdFire line could also do it with some trap handlers for the bitfield instructions (and a CF at 190Mhz even doing some instruction emulation will be faster then the 16Mhz EZ, esp. since the CF can execute &gt;1 instruction per cycle while the EZ rarely executes a whole instruction in a cycle).

The big problem will be the perphrials integrated in the EZ. Many of which will only effect the OS (like the memory interface - setting the size and #of wait states for diffrent memory devices) and hacks. Some of which might be accessed directly (the IR part, the serial, the display) by real programs.

To remain totally compatable they may be forced to use one chip for the CPU, and another for some or all of the perphrials. Or switch to the ColdFire which is available as a macrocell so they could put many perphrials on the same ASIC as the CPU (including some of the descrete parts int he current Visor and Palm). Unfortunitly both approches will increse cost, and the non CF solution may increse size as well.

It'll also be an intresting trick to make a color LCD controler that looks like a 4/16 grey controler to applications that insist on frobing it themselves.

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Pittsford,NY,USA
Posts: 223

I did think of one possible way, if they switched to a RISC processor and ran the current "legacy" Palm programs in an emulator. (Like they do to run legacy 68K code on the Macs.)

The emulator already exists as part of the Palm developers kit. (CoPilot)

-Eric

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Burlington, VT, USA
Posts: 127

Methinks the success of the Palm platform is such that Motorola will be working with Palm and its licensees in creating a next-generation chip that supports color and other features... I don't think Handspring and Palm will be stuck taking whatever Moto churns out...

Or they could just port the Palm emulator to the GeForce256 chip from NVidia and we'll see some REAL handheld graphics... :-)