u/user5518

About seven years ago, Dmitry showed a T3 running Palm OS 6: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/cjx9d9/palmos_61_cobalt_on_a_tt3/ A few months later, someone asked: "Is there a way to run PalmOS Cobalt on a real device?" u/gruberkristof: Today the answer is yes!

Now it boots on my Tungsten T3, loaded from an SD card into RAM. The flash is never touched, and a reset brings back Palm OS 5.

Try it yourself. You need:

• a Tungsten T3 with its original Palm OS 5
• an SD card between 32 MB and 1 GB, with a single FAT partition
• Cocoboot and the Cobalt ROM image, both on palmdb.net
• Python 3 on any computer

A small script builds the boot file. You copy it to the card, start Cocoboot and tap "Boot!". After about 40 seconds, Cobalt greets you with its setup.

• Step by step: https://palm2000.com/articles/52#try-it-yourself
• Shim and script: https://github.com/User7142/TT3-OS6-Cobalt

Not working yet: SD card, Bluetooth and power off. Your T3 will also show the device ID and Bluetooth address of the T3 the ROM came from. Back up your data first, because Cobalt overwrites the RAM. And as always: at your own risk.

If you're curious how it got there, including ten boot attempts and a dead reset button, Part 1 is here: https://palm2000.com/articles/51

A few days ago I posted the title theme - now you can actually play the beginning of Part One: the lookout, the SCUMM Bar with the cook and the pirate leaders, the ghost ship, the street with the Voodoo Lady and the map of Mêlée Island.

It's a small adventure engine plus a build tool. The tool converts backgrounds, characters, texts and music from your own copy of the game into one. arduboy package - no game data is included.

You need the VGA floppy version (DISK01–04.LEC; the CD and Special Edition don't work yet) and a Linux PC or Mac to build it.

- Article: https://palm2000.com/articles/50

- GitHub: https://github.com/User7142/pocket-adventure-fx

- community.arduboy.com: https://community.arduboy.com/t/the-first-scenes-of-the-secret-of-monkey-island-on-the-arduboy-fx/13756

Let me know if it works for you :-)

As promised in my last post, here is the fix, ready for everyone to test.

It's a beta: please make a HotSync backup first (it converts your stored dates), and report issues via GitHub if you can.

Since you know what this is all about, here are the 3 most important links:

• Release (.prc): https://github.com/User7142/palm-datefix/releases
• Source: https://github.com/User7142/palm-datefix
• Write-up with photos, the measurements and all the ways it failed first: https://palm2000.com/articles/49

Have fun :-)

EDIT: Thanks to Discord user DirtyHarray for pointing this out: the basic idea is not new. I read the source of NaivePalmdayMitigation by u/Tavisco (two C files), and as far as I can tell from the code, the clock is run in the past and 56 years are added whenever a year is drawn (DateTemplateToAscii and a reimplemented SelectDay, Palm OS 3.5 - 4.x, HackMaster/X-Master). The README calls it "a mitigation, not a fix", but mechanically it is a manual shift of the epoch, and 56 = 2 x 28 is a neat choice: weekdays and leap years line up without any patching.

I should have credited him in the post. The article, the README and the release notes do now. What DateFix adds is mostly automation and coverage: it moves the clock itself, converts the stored dates, patches more of the date API and also runs on Palm OS 5. The limits are the same for both (128-year window, apps that draw the year themselves need their own patches).

Tavisco's project: https://github.com/Tavisco/NaivePalmdayMitigation

Currently working on a fix so we can keep using our beloved Palm OS PDAs after Palm Day (December 31, 2031) – already running on my Tungsten T3.

Edit: As soon as it's finished and running on most of my devices, I'll publish the code on GitHub (thanks to u/scienceapps for the suggestion!) and also post an article about it on my website, but first I need to fix a few bugs.

2nd Edit: I need to add that the basic idea comes from u/Tavisco's NaivePalmdayMitigation, which I should have credited from the start (thanks to Discord user DirtyHarray for pointing it out - better late than never). My fix automates and extends it: it moves the clock, converts stored dates, and also runs on Palm OS 5.

Over the last weeks I finished three Palm projects that had been lying around for a while, wrote them up on my site and put everything on GitHub.

1. Building Palm OS apps on Apple Silicon

A complete Palm OS development environment for macOS ARM, based on savaughn's palmdev-macos. It builds 68K apps for Palm OS 4 and native ARM apps for Palm OS 5 (via PEAL) with one Makefile. There is also a zip file with everything in it – unpack and build, no Homebrew, no sudo.

• Article: https://palm2000.com/articles/46
• GitHub: https://github.com/User7142/palmdev-macos

2. HotSync for macOS

Palm Desktop is long gone, and I wanted to install my own apps without typing pilot-xfer commands. So I wrote a small menu bar app: drop a .prc or .pdb file on it, press HotSync on the Palm, done. It uses pilot-link, which – since version 0.15 – builds on Apple Silicon out of the box. There is a ready-to-use build for Apple Silicon Macs (macOS 14+) with pilot-xfer included.

• Article: https://palm2000.com/articles/43
• GitHub and download: https://github.com/User7142/hotsync-macos

3. Decoding the Veo Photo Traveler

I found this little SD card camera on eBay some time ago. It stores every picture as a .pdb file with its own compression, and the Windows software that converted them is long gone. It took me a few months (with a lot of breaks) to reverse-engineer the format: it turned out to be raw Bayer sensor data with a simple delta compression. A small Python script now turns the .pdb files into JPEGs again.

• Article: https://palm2000.com/articles/47
• GitHub: https://github.com/User7142/veo-decoder

If you have a Veo Photo Traveler and old pictures from it, or you try the toolchain or the HotSync app, I'd be happy to hear how it works for you. (And not just on my machine. 😉)Palm OS development on a current Mac: a toolchain for Apple Silicon, a native HotSync app, and a decoder for the Veo Photo Traveler camera

Inspired by https://github.com/pdxiv/monkey-island-pc-speaker-theme-on-arduino