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Foobazco PalmPilot Development HOWTO

Thanks to the interest of Mr Book and the total lack of life on the part of The Man, fallout now hosts (among others) a complete PalmPilot development environment. The Palm has a "Dragonball" MC68328 microcontroller on board. From a programming standpoint, this is a 68000.

The most important thing to do to develop for the pilot is to add the cross-build to your path. The necessary tools are in /usr/local/palm-cross/bin/. This toolset includes binutils 2.9.1+patches, gcc 2.95.2+patches, gdb 4.18+patches (probably not useful), and the necessary C library support from Palm. In addition, the pilrc and pilrcui utilities have been installed there (version 2.5b1). Unfortunately, while the GNU parts of the toolchain look rock-solid, pilrc is a sloppily ported lose16 application, and I had a good deal of trouble getting it working (SPARC requires much stricter alignment than Intel; failing to do this causes bus errors). So let me know if you have any trouble with it.

If you are developing your own from-scratch program, get one of the sample Makefiles from the 'net.

Make sure you select your PalmOS target. The local default is the latest SDK, version 3.5. Many packages out there expect that you will be using the default version 2 SDK. We support versions 1, 2, 3.1, and 3.5. To select your SDK, add the flag '-palmosX' flag to your CFLAGS or equivalent. Valid vales for X are '1', '2', '3.1', and '3.5', the last of which is the default.

I was going to talk in more detail about this stuff, and put up a bunch of links, but I'm tired and don't really care. I'll trust you to do what I did and go on over to the web's most important Palm (and everything else) resource, Google. Have fun.