As he says, it’s only proof of concept right now. You can see it lags just a tad. But imagine this thing running full-power and full-speed on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
Now that Paul Guyot’s Einstein, the Newton emulator for Mac and Windows, is available for Snow Leopard, users with up-to-date Macs can play around with the Newton OS.
This seemed like the perfect time to give Einstein a spin on my new iMac.
First, I downloaded the latest Einstein app from Google Code, plus the Users Manual. The Users Manual is handy because it gives instructions on how to grab a ROM image of your OS 2.x Newton device. In my case, I’m grabbing my eMate’s ROM with a package of file called Lantern DDK (thanks to Macintosh Garden).
Lantern DDK gives you ROMs from an eMate and an MP2000, along with a few other pieces of debugging software.
Einstein has you pick which Newton device you want to emulate, and point it toward a viable ROM image. Then you pick how much RAM you want the thing to have, native or full-screen resolution (warning: full screen is a bear), and how to run the screen and sound.
After a few minutes of booting, Einstein pops up with a Newton screen showing that it’s working fine.
From there, the pseudo eMate runs through the name, address, and time setup process. What’s nice about Einstein is that it grabbed my Address Book information automatically.
Then you get a simple Notes interface. And that’s about it, at least from what I saw, so it could be that the ROM only has certain features from the eMate. But it’s a fun little project to get running on your Mac. Note, though, that Einstein also has a Windows version.
[Thanks to Riccordo Mori for the inspiration to give it a try, and NewtonTalk for the link.]
Is Google’s Android mobile platform the Newton fan’s savior at bringing a Newton-clone app to fruition?
When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, I wondered whether someone could use it to develop an Einstein-based Newton app – even just to mess around with – for Apple’s Mobile OS X.
Because of the licensing agreement, a Newton app is probably impossible. But on the open-source Android OS and its new Android Market, the dream of a modern-day Einstein hack might be realized.
Now that Android has its own “app store,” some bootstrapping developer could do something really cool. A touch screen, a stylus, some sort of handwriting recognition, and access to the OS’s dates and contacts and notes, and you might be all set.
I’m positive its nowhere near that simple to develop a Newton emulator for a mobile phone. But one can dream, right?
After the iPhone SDK was release, I wondered whether it would make sense to throw a Newton emulator in the mix. Shucks, I wondered whether it would even be possible.
Leave it to Newton programmers to actually do the digging.
Well, I started out by ensuring that Einstein would build on the new
SDK. Then tried changing targets to see what would happen. I did this for KLibs as well as Einstein. K Libs seems to build fine as a static library using the new target which was sort of surprising to me but since the BSD subsystem can be installed on the iPhone I thought perhaps it would work. When building Einstein for the new target I run into complications. There are two at the moment that I am facing. One is with missing X11 header files and the other with the K Libs dependency. Not sure why the compiler isn’t finding the X include files since I am certain the X11 SDK is installed and Einstein did build cleanly before. I am sure it’s just a configuration problem in the project that I’ve caused. So far I haven’t had any luck trying to resolve the dependency with K Libs that Einstein has by creating a new target, one that depends upon a new K Libs target for the new target device.
And a reply, from Matthias:
Do not build the target based on X11. X11 is not part of the iPhone
and so it is not part of the iPhone header files (they are different
headers than the system header files). Einstein for iPhone must be built using the special iPhone version of Cocoa, which is quite similar, yet not the same. You have to use UIKit to generate the basic UI and emulator surface.
I don’t know about you, but there’s hope to be found. Newton developers are working on the iNewton as I type this – and that’s a neat feeling. Give them all the support you can!
Einstein ports the Newton’s operating system ROM onto Macs and lets you play around with the OS on your desktop. The whole project has now become open source, called OpenEinstein.
What I particularly enjoy is the reactions of other people. Some artificial intelligence researchers were amazed at this even if the handwriting recognition is no rocket science nowadays.
Guyot’s efforts are part of a movement to get Newtons to connect with just about every OS and work on any non-Apple hardware – like this – available.
