Great vid! Ex-Palm employee and creator of Deity 3D engine here; @14:13 The Deity engine and (also used in Master Thief 3D) was really approaching the best that could be done with the CPU power and memory at hand (written in 100% 68K assembly). Full-blown DooM was/is not going to happen on the DragonBall series (we used a lot of tricks to get close-ish, such as "fake" floor/ceiling/water texture mapping). That said, we did re-create the entire E1M1 level in Deity, which looked fairly close to the real thing. Back then the DooM source, nor assets were free for use, so sadly, it remained for internal use only. Fun fact; Deity3D started its life on a Palm V (my first PalmOS device). Fun times! 😃
Awesome to have you here! I was blown away when I first saw these 3D engines running on my earlier Palm models. Thanks for making this and sharing these details with us :)
Mate, i don't have anything interesting to say or smart to comment about in particular regarding this video, just that i think your channel is awesome and i always learn something every time you upload. Cheers Janus Cycle.
@@belstar1128 Almost all of the software library being more or less freely available as abandonware helps A LOT tbh, been that way for me for over a decade. It's great!
Same. In my small town our teachers were issued Palm Pilots but not many used them. Despite being a lazy student one of my 9th grade teachers would let me play on hers when I finished my test or class work. I loved the helocopter game.
One particular thing the PalmOS devices have over current Android and iOS devices is that you could sync your calendar, memos, addresses, etc *LOCALLY*. No having to squirt your changes to some unknown server in a 3rd-world country, just to squirt it back to a device 2 feet away from the computer. Having to rely on an external server (even if it's a Nextcloud machine in your own network) is a definite step backwards.
@@SenileOtaku besides this, took years to google apps for example to get near of how productive Palm OS calendar, todo etc apps were. They were so smooth to use.
Did the music get too loud at any point in this video? If yes some timestamps will help. I've been working at improving audio and your feedback on any aspects of the sound quality in this video is greatly appreciated . Thank you.
Do you use Premiere? If so the easiest fix I can recommend is using the Essential Sound window. Something more advanced in any NLE would be using a Plugin like the Fabfilter Pro-L2 on your music track and then separately on your mix bus.
The music volume is alright, but your voice could use some post-processing. I would suggest using some compression and limiting to reduce the dynamics a bit, maybe even some equalisation. That will make your voiceover cut through the music a lot more, especially since you have a more quiet and calm way of speaking. Also, it sounds like you're using noise reduction on your voiceover, which I wouldn't really suggest using unless it's absolutely necessary. What's your microphone, actually? Does it have a lot of background noise?
@@noisykestrel I do have 16dB of compression and some equalization on this video and no noise reduction. Previous videos were set differently. I have a basic video mic just like a Rode but a cheaper alternative. I'm saving up for a better mic. Thanks, I appreciate these details. I need to work on voice equalization more and music equalization to really get my voice to stand out.
When I was a kid I had a similar device with a barcode scanner built in. They were thrown out at my dads workplace. I absolutely loved the thing, took it everywere to play games and scan every barcode I could find. Way cooler than a gameboy because it has a laser! :D
Sony really made some of the nicest, most feature-packed PalmOS devices every. The last one I carried was a TH55, but I also owned an SL10 and later bought an NX70 for collecting purposes. The best actual Palm-made device was, in my opinion, the IIIC. I played Bejewelled so much on that, I wore grooves in the display. I really hope some day, PDA's make a comeback. I'd love to see what companies can do with modern tech.
I'd love a set of hardware buttons on my phone though like a DPAD and others to properly play doom or gameboy games without using 3rd party controllers...
❤The old technology is better than now ... Simplicity ... Effectiveness ... No ads ... No visual pollution ... Thank you ... Wait every day to watch your content... Truly your channel is a treasure ...With all the love
If you can find it, Kinoma player will play audio over the integrated speaker. They have to be encoded by Kinoma on PC... but audio on a piezo speaker blew me away in high school
Man, Kinoma Player. I was just thinking about this software and couldn't remember the name. Used the heck out of that on my Windows Mobile devices before I hopped to a Palm Pre > Android.
Sony's 230x230 grayscale screen is really something to behold in real life. It looks much better than the numbers would suggest to modern sensibilities. Obviously it also looked amazing back in the day when you were used to 160x160 but since the SJ/SL Clies I've scarcely seen any other monochrome LCD match it. If you have ever seen a Handera 330 in real life this seems downright HD by comparison. And the Handera had a somewhat standard 320x240 mono screen and I think was the first such Palm device with a virtual silkscreen. Very nice device that, as well as the TRG Pro that came before it. Sony ofc was the next to do 'Hi-Res' screens, I have an NR70 and it also was a Palm OS 4 device but with a 320x480 full color screen, very cool~ I also appreciated some of the small QoL updates Sony did with their Palm devices, like including a backup to memory stick right in Applications and the ability to make the icons small, it was almost like a very lite launcher. The jog wheel was also a nice touch but Sony was putting that on everything in the Y2Ks. Some of the problems that arose from pre-OS5 Hi-Res screens was that some programs wrote directly to the Palm LCD instead of using normal APIs so compatibility was a problem, rare but it happened. That is also why plenty of old applications crash on the emulator I think. I've encountered some that don't play well on OS 5 hardware. That 128x2 Memorystick you have there is neat, I have a translucent purple one. And that manufacturer 'Hagiwara' made other Clie accessories. They even made a Wifi memory Stick. Also, you can technically force the CPU to directly make more sound come out of the buzzer than just beeps. Do you know how super early DOS games only had the pc speaker? Well there were ways to make regular sounds with those, i think the same principle applied to this. That it is possible but you use so much CPU that it isn't worth it for games all the time. I have an old proof of concept PRC that I downloaded a long time ago. There was also a Amiga MOD tracker that worked with the old OS4 Palms called PsyTexx. Worth a look. Also also, if you want to be blown away, check out some of the PocketPCs from ~2005. They had full VGA resolution screens! 640x480 in 2005 was out of this world. I posses an example, a Dell Axim x50v. It is really something else (even if the viewing angles are horrid, IPS these were not, Lol)
I had the Clie SJ-22 as a kid. I think it was this version with color. It was amazing. I remember watching the demo video on it for the first time, blew me away.
Technically I was saying that these bank switching sticks were popular among Memory Stick users. I do agree though that Sony desperately wanted Memory Sticks to be more popular in general.
I believe the "power related chip " at 4:38 is actually the beeper, as both of its pins seems to be coupled by the 2caps below and there is a tuned hole on the plastic top to resonance air in a specific frequency.
Awesome video! Brings back great memories of making Palm OS do stuff that modern cell phones can do but years before the iPhone existed! I have a Sony Clié too but mine has a color screen. My favorite Palm ever will always be the Tapewave Zodiac!
Just another awesome production! You make any type of ancient technology look like futuristic and somehow you pay a tribute to all the great people's hard work that made today's tech possible. Just love it 👍
I love that every new tech in the 90's felt like a miracle, even simple gadgets, and not just because i was young back then. The leap in technology was huge in the 90's compared to the 80's that was also similar. Now basically everything is more or less the same like we had 15-20 yrs ago. Sure better resolution, faster processing and all that and VR is obviously great now, but i'm not that excited anymore, we take that stuff for granted now and people are even getting tired of the tech, especially when it comes to social media platforms. It's just not fun anymore, more like an addiction. Too much of the good makes it bad
I legitimately had to restart the video because it sounded like you said "My favorite pound of ice." Excellent video by the way! I used to own a Palm Tungsten E that I put TCPMP on. The good old days. :)
I had one of the Palm Pilot IIIc models, cost me 500$ back in the days, but oh boy was it worth it, I literally used it till the buttons physically withered away and fell off. The display of the IIIc rivals ANY displays ever made for these, it had only 256 Colors but was an TFT display which was a really big deal back then. Having only 256 colors also gave it an edge of crystal clarity and also crazy sharp black-levels, which means it literally looked like an Oled display. Playing Galaxian on it was like the Arcade original and it looked absolutely gorgeous. You could view it from all angles, and it was so gobsmackingly beautiful to look at.
My understanding is this was the first colour Palm model ever. That must have been very cool. I would love to see one in person now after hearing your description.
@@JanusCycle I still have it in my collection of a lot of Palm Pilots. I need to 3D print new buttons and put a new Li-Ion battery into it, I'll get to it one day.
@@JanusCycle You tempted me into doing the repairs now, so I opened it up. Battery was as expected completely dead, I tried my old Li-Ion tricks to bring it back to life, but its totally shorted, What I further did was to connect the terminals to my Lab Power Supply, and the unit works just fine. Lights up, goes through the calibration process, and the screen is gorgeous.
I used to have a clié sj22 (I think) as my first sony pda. I bought the headphone adapter immediately and had a pretty cool digital music player akin to my old handspring pda's. Good times!😊
I use a CLIÉ SL10 (same form factor, but no white backlight) to play a Japanese card game (Hanafuda Koi-Koi) which only works on monochrome devices. It's on PalmDB.
Have several Palms and Clie including the color ones. Enjoyed the Sony ones much more. I remember spending MUCH time with these devices. Having from an HP41 and TI86 background. 🙂
Great video. I was a big user of Palm devices back in the day, especially the Sony CLIÉ devices. I started with a used Palm V, before moving on to a few different CLIÉs, but eventually settled on the NX70V for several years, until I left PalmOS for BlackBerry. Re: your comment that the SJ20 seemed to be a low-end product, just as a general guide: The S/SL/SJ series was the entry level, T/TJ/TG/TH were the "workhorse" midrange devices, and the N/NR/NX/NZ were the high-end. The UX were the oddballs, more targeted towards being style-concious (although most of the CLIÉs blurred that line a bit, especially the NX and NZ). The VZ leaned entirely into the style/entertainment/consumer category as a halo product that tried (and failed) to redifine the PalmOS market.
If it's really the case that it doesn't have any special hardware to help with the graphics then it's really impressive that they managed to render four times the pixels without a significant impact on performance, they were basically stretching the hardware and software as far as it could go. And that's a really nice looking screen, back in the days of monochrome LCDs it was rare to see a device with a backlight display that looked that nice, even if the ghosting is a bit too noticeable for modern sensibilities.
MB86Lxxx looks like RF Transceiver Family of Fujitsu, MB87L is close enough. It maybe RF related. Edit: MB87L2250 is "MPEG2 Transport, Video and Audio Decoder with integrated 32-Bit RISC CPU" from 1998. It can be related to that. MB87L2070 is a "QAM Demodulator" from 1999
Sony devices in the 90s and early 2000s had this futuristic tech wonderland feel. They made these tiny machines brimming with ports and neat features. This minimalist Apple future that we have now really sucks. Even with the slab phone design there is a lot of room for variety that no one takes advantage of. I'd love more ports or how about one of those side toggle switches!? They would be great for scrolling websites and reading ebooks.
I had a Clie SJ-20 when I was a kid! I saved up my allowance forever so I could have some kind of portable computer, since I had to travel 4 hours between my parents every 2 weeks.
That fujitsu IC is a video and audio decoder with an integrated 32bit RISC CPU, fast transfer and manipulation of image and sound data, and a many other related functionalities. It was released in the mid to late 90s.
I just found a Palm TX on eBay for pretty cheap, along with a new battery. I didn't know they were on eBay until watching this video and deciding to find out what the last true Palm PDAs were, and well, one fell in my shopping basket 😅 I have a broken T5 and M100 in a display cabinet, but I think having a working one could be cool. I had a IIIx at university, then later a Tapwave Zodiac.
@@JanusCycle it was a cool device, but like most niche devices it barely had any software that took advantage of the extra controls and hardware. It was still really just a PalmOS device unless you could find the few games. It was still very cool though, I had it in my car as an mp3 player for a while.
I have a PEG-SL10. That's a cheaper model, but according to reviews from back then it has the same LCD, only with a worse backlight behind it. It also takes AAAs instead of having an internal lithium battery, which I consider a benefit since you don't have to worry about the factory battery having died in the past 20 years. All in all they're both good devices and among the best of the classic 68000 Palms.
Why the Palm Vx? The m500 is a significantly better device in every possible way. For what it's worth, the Handera 330 also has a 320x320 pixel grayscale display. The EL backlight on Palms wears out and gets dim with time. It was not always so dim, and the m500 has an improved backlight as well. You should try Secret of the Orb Gold Edition, its one of the best monochrome Palm games, and it does a lot of programming tricks for performance. The Handera 330 deals with it perfectly fine, but despite collecting Palm devices, I always avoided the Sony devices as much as possible. I'd be curious to know if it works properly.
This is an excellent question! I would love a m500 and I've been looking for one for a long time. I agree that in general it has better qualities over the Vx. The answer might come down to more personal and subjective things like my leather wallet won't fit on the m500 and the shape of the Vx just being slightly more aesthetically pleasing to me. Thanks for the game tip. I'm checking that one out now!
I have an SJ20, and a Palm Tungsten E2 still. The E2 came with that rare Palm folding IR keyboard, which I also still have. The Palm has lots of neat software on it, is overclocked from 200Mhz to 333Mhz, has 2GB SD card limit removed so can use large SD cards. Has Little John Palm, Quake, Doom...Bejeweled. I used the E2 way more than the Clie, as you can tell.
And people complain about iPhone with 800x1700 pixels being "low" resolution. Sure, it's like 16 years newer than this one, but our eyes aren't getting any better.
I had a CLIE PEG SL10-E, the battery you installed may fry it at some point, if above ~3.3V, as that's what happened with mine. On a 3.0V discharged battery, it powered on, used it for a few hours, had to charge it, of course it was 3.6V, it blew up.
i lovrd my pda life back in the day , I had a clie , a palm pilot , a tapwave zodiac , some windows CE devices , I used my zodiac until the first netbook arrived the asus eeepc 701 , that changed everything , I could run Morrowind on it
not really, if you go back to first Macintosh it had the OG MC68000 clocked at 1/4 frequency pushing almost double resolution (granted 1bit instead of 4) with no graphics chip whatever and just 128KB RAM. Now that was pushing the limits...
@@deliternity I understand, but the DragonBall is miniaturized re-packed MC68000 (with some added on die features like graphics controller, direct DRAM access etc.), so I dont see where did SONY pushed the DragonBall beyond its limits.
I think the Fujitsu MB87L4631 is some sort of custom version of video/audio decoder chip with build in RISC cpu. Like the MB87L2250, where u find datasheets online.
There is a 64 bit Palm Hotsync driver that works on Windows 11. But there is a problem with profile names between the Hotsync Manager and the driver. It took me hours of fiddling to get this working. Then it stopped again.
Hi, the large component with the dot is the speaker, I have come across LCD modules with MediaQ chips on the LCD module itself so maybe it something that is true here as well
I have a palm iiic that I had to replace the worn out backlight using bits and pieces from both my original and a parts unit. Next up on my repair list is the broken power button and the worn out battery. I also need to locate my stylus that fell somewhere on the floor days ago.
@@JanusCycle it has been functional this whole time. The backlight swap was to handle how orange the background was getting. As for the broken power button it still works just requires a bit of force as part of the plastic button had disappeared after it had been disassembled. As for the battery it holds a charge but not for more than an hour or two
I'm 99% sure there's no GPU or "hardware assistance". They simply rewrote the standard graphics functions to work with doubled pixels (and the text routines to use the high-res fonts regardless, just at pixel-doubled *positions*). A 33MHz 68000 had enough power to deal with that. There were some apps that were incompatible with the OS4 Cliés, and those were presumably the ones that did stuff with the LCD controller or framebuffer directly, bypassing the OS routines. Those would have had their 160x160 assumptions broken.
I'm also leaning to this all being done in software. If the CPU had enough power, then why did Sony include a GPU in OS4 Cliés? I would like to get one to compare this.
I'm still in my 20s, but I miss those days of diverse tech that constantly gave people unique experiences, it was so much more fun compared to the same boring mass-produced Android/iOS devices we have now every year. It's ironic that no one talked about "diversity" back then, but there was more of it in every part of our lives.
@@JanusCycle The problem with modern software is that most of it is poorly optimized, often lags even on high-end processors, and takes up too much space. Older hardware required developers to manage limited resources efficiently, but most programmers today just don't care about that.
I'd be very interested to see what you do with these devices as EDC. what software do you use o get the most out of these? do you use them for the original uses, contacts and calendars, or is there some newer software that let you do more modern things?
Clie devices were so posh. Frankly I really like Sony's design language of that era. Also that 'power device' is the speaker/beeper. Hm, come to think of it - never bothered taking apart my SJ22, boy the screen on that thing was tack sharp after original palm.
could we get a video about motorla rarz v3-v3i? I got one, that was my childhood phone ugh I was dying to get one as a child, and I just want to explore it's full capabilities before the 2g network shut downs here. please I guess you are the only channel do these type of things on this platform.
Great vid! Ex-Palm employee and creator of Deity 3D engine here; @14:13 The Deity engine and (also used in Master Thief 3D) was really approaching the best that could be done with the CPU power and memory at hand (written in 100% 68K assembly).
Full-blown DooM was/is not going to happen on the DragonBall series (we used a lot of tricks to get close-ish, such as "fake" floor/ceiling/water texture mapping). That said, we did re-create the entire E1M1 level in Deity, which looked fairly close to the real thing. Back then the DooM source, nor assets were free for use, so sadly, it remained for internal use only.
Fun fact; Deity3D started its life on a Palm V (my first PalmOS device).
Fun times! 😃
Awesome to have you here! I was blown away when I first saw these 3D engines running on my earlier Palm models. Thanks for making this and sharing these details with us :)
We bow to your brilliance Sir
Hi ex-Palm guy. Me too, in a way.
We built vast numbers of Palm devices here in Utah and I was also a Palm beta tester.
Mate, i don't have anything interesting to say or smart to comment about in particular regarding this video, just that i think your channel is awesome and i always learn something every time you upload. Cheers Janus Cycle.
Really glad you're enjoying the channel :)
Here here! :)
Annoying loud music with lazy voice 😏😏😏
This just about sums it up for me
Despite how limited they were, there's a part of me that feels deeply nostalgic for these old PalmOS devices.
they are less limited than i remember honestly
@@belstar1128 Almost all of the software library being more or less freely available as abandonware helps A LOT tbh, been that way for me for over a decade. It's great!
Same. In my small town our teachers were issued Palm Pilots but not many used them. Despite being a lazy student one of my 9th grade teachers would let me play on hers when I finished my test or class work. I loved the helocopter game.
One particular thing the PalmOS devices have over current Android and iOS devices is that you could sync your calendar, memos, addresses, etc *LOCALLY*. No having to squirt your changes to some unknown server in a 3rd-world country, just to squirt it back to a device 2 feet away from the computer. Having to rely on an external server (even if it's a Nextcloud machine in your own network) is a definite step backwards.
@@SenileOtaku besides this, took years to google apps for example to get near of how productive Palm OS calendar, todo etc apps were. They were so smooth to use.
Did the music get too loud at any point in this video? If yes some timestamps will help. I've been working at improving audio and your feedback on any aspects of the sound quality in this video is greatly appreciated . Thank you.
Everything was fine with the sound.
Do you use Premiere? If so the easiest fix I can recommend is using the Essential Sound window.
Something more advanced in any NLE would be using a Plugin like the Fabfilter Pro-L2 on your music track and then separately on your mix bus.
The music volume is alright, but your voice could use some post-processing. I would suggest using some compression and limiting to reduce the dynamics a bit, maybe even some equalisation. That will make your voiceover cut through the music a lot more, especially since you have a more quiet and calm way of speaking. Also, it sounds like you're using noise reduction on your voiceover, which I wouldn't really suggest using unless it's absolutely necessary. What's your microphone, actually? Does it have a lot of background noise?
@@noisykestrel I do have 16dB of compression and some equalization on this video and no noise reduction. Previous videos were set differently. I have a basic video mic just like a Rode but a cheaper alternative. I'm saving up for a better mic.
Thanks, I appreciate these details. I need to work on voice equalization more and music equalization to really get my voice to stand out.
@@xmlthegreat I'm using Resolve but I hadn't considered using plugins. Thanks, I will look into this option.
When I was a kid I had a similar device with a barcode scanner built in. They were thrown out at my dads workplace. I absolutely loved the thing, took it everywere to play games and scan every barcode I could find. Way cooler than a gameboy because it has a laser! :D
That sounds like an awesome score. Well done on putting it to use.
They look so modern and yet so dated at the same time
Retro futuristic :)
wow your voice is making my anxious mind getting calmer 🏝 thanx for 16 minutes of chill
excellent, thanks!
Sony really made some of the nicest, most feature-packed PalmOS devices every. The last one I carried was a TH55, but I also owned an SL10 and later bought an NX70 for collecting purposes. The best actual Palm-made device was, in my opinion, the IIIC. I played Bejewelled so much on that, I wore grooves in the display.
I really hope some day, PDA's make a comeback. I'd love to see what companies can do with modern tech.
Ooh, the TH55 is a nice device. One day . .
You have your PDA, though it runs android now and does anything and everything I wished my palm could!
I'd say Planet Computers tries to fill the PDA niche now, at least if we're talking of Psion-like PDAs
I'd love a set of hardware buttons on my phone though like a DPAD and others to properly play doom or gameboy games without using 3rd party controllers...
4:38 Judging by the small opening in that component, I would argue this to be a piezo buzzer.
Yep. That's 100% a piezo buzzer. Worked with them before
Came here to say that. I used one like these in a hardware design once. :)
I like Janus Style. Always a joy to watch those high quality videos with lots of details including tech stuff.
Awesome :)
❤The old technology is better than now ... Simplicity ... Effectiveness ... No ads ... No visual pollution ... Thank you ... Wait every day to watch your content... Truly your channel is a treasure ...With all the love
If you can find it, Kinoma player will play audio over the integrated speaker. They have to be encoded by Kinoma on PC... but audio on a piezo speaker blew me away in high school
Thanks, this is exactly the sort of thing I want to try.
Man, Kinoma Player. I was just thinking about this software and couldn't remember the name. Used the heck out of that on my Windows Mobile devices before I hopped to a Palm Pre > Android.
Thanks
Thank you! you're really helping to me to keep going with all this.
Sony Clies were so cool and desirable when I was a teenager. I wanted one so much.
Saaaaaammmmeeeee
Sony's 230x230 grayscale screen is really something to behold in real life. It looks much better than the numbers would suggest to modern sensibilities.
Obviously it also looked amazing back in the day when you were used to 160x160 but since the SJ/SL Clies I've scarcely seen any other monochrome LCD match it.
If you have ever seen a Handera 330 in real life this seems downright HD by comparison. And the Handera had a somewhat standard 320x240 mono screen and I think was the first such Palm device with a virtual silkscreen. Very nice device that, as well as the TRG Pro that came before it.
Sony ofc was the next to do 'Hi-Res' screens, I have an NR70 and it also was a Palm OS 4 device but with a 320x480 full color screen, very cool~
I also appreciated some of the small QoL updates Sony did with their Palm devices, like including a backup to memory stick right in Applications and the ability to make the icons small, it was almost like a very lite launcher. The jog wheel was also a nice touch but Sony was putting that on everything in the Y2Ks.
Some of the problems that arose from pre-OS5 Hi-Res screens was that some programs wrote directly to the Palm LCD instead of using normal APIs so compatibility was a problem, rare but it happened. That is also why plenty of old applications crash on the emulator I think. I've encountered some that don't play well on OS 5 hardware.
That 128x2 Memorystick you have there is neat, I have a translucent purple one. And that manufacturer 'Hagiwara' made other Clie accessories. They even made a Wifi memory Stick.
Also, you can technically force the CPU to directly make more sound come out of the buzzer than just beeps. Do you know how super early DOS games only had the pc speaker? Well there were ways to make regular sounds with those, i think the same principle applied to this. That it is possible but you use so much CPU that it isn't worth it for games all the time. I have an old proof of concept PRC that I downloaded a long time ago. There was also a Amiga MOD tracker that worked with the old OS4 Palms called PsyTexx. Worth a look.
Also also, if you want to be blown away, check out some of the PocketPCs from ~2005. They had full VGA resolution screens! 640x480 in 2005 was out of this world. I posses an example, a Dell Axim x50v. It is really something else (even if the viewing angles are horrid, IPS these were not, Lol)
I had the Clie SJ-22 as a kid. I think it was this version with color. It was amazing. I remember watching the demo video on it for the first time, blew me away.
"Memory Sticks were popular at the time" is a sentence that Sony always desperately wanted to be true.
Technically I was saying that these bank switching sticks were popular among Memory Stick users. I do agree though that Sony desperately wanted Memory Sticks to be more popular in general.
I believe the "power related chip " at 4:38 is actually the beeper, as both of its pins seems to be coupled by the 2caps below and there is a tuned hole on the plastic top to resonance air in a specific frequency.
Like a piezoelectric speaker of some sort
Yep, I think you are correct there. It does now seem to be the speaker to me as well.
I think that hardware-level supersampling is how Apple does their liquid retina displays.
Sir, I am quite pleased by the quality of this video and the interesting calm narrative. You put effort into this, thank you!
I'm pleased you enjoyed this, thanks for letting me know!
Always informative, entertaining, unpretentious... keep doing what you're doing
Hey thanks, I appreciate hearing this.
Awesome video! Brings back great memories of making Palm OS do stuff that modern cell phones can do but years before the iPhone existed! I have a Sony Clié too but mine has a color screen. My favorite Palm ever will always be the Tapewave Zodiac!
I'm looking forward to getting a close look at some colour Clié models. Glad you enjoyed this video :)
Just another awesome production! You make any type of ancient technology look like futuristic and somehow you pay a tribute to all the great people's hard work that made today's tech possible. Just love it 👍
I like that description :)
❤
I love that every new tech in the 90's felt like a miracle, even simple gadgets, and not just because i was young back then. The leap in technology was huge in the 90's compared to the 80's that was also similar. Now basically everything is more or less the same like we had 15-20 yrs ago. Sure better resolution, faster processing and all that and VR is obviously great now, but i'm not that excited anymore, we take that stuff for granted now and people are even getting tired of the tech, especially when it comes to social media platforms. It's just not fun anymore, more like an addiction. Too much of the good makes it bad
I legitimately had to restart the video because it sounded like you said "My favorite pound of ice."
Excellent video by the way! I used to own a Palm Tungsten E that I put TCPMP on. The good old days. :)
While I could make a video about my favourite ices, I tend to use the metric system :)
I totally forgot about "The Core" Pocket Media Player! I used it on my HTC TyTn Windows Mobile phone.
I had one of the Palm Pilot IIIc models, cost me 500$ back in the days, but oh boy was it worth it, I literally used it till the buttons physically withered away and fell off. The display of the IIIc rivals ANY displays ever made for these, it had only 256 Colors but was an TFT display which was a really big deal back then. Having only 256 colors also gave it an edge of crystal clarity and also crazy sharp black-levels, which means it literally looked like an Oled display. Playing Galaxian on it was like the Arcade original and it looked absolutely gorgeous. You could view it from all angles, and it was so gobsmackingly beautiful to look at.
My understanding is this was the first colour Palm model ever. That must have been very cool. I would love to see one in person now after hearing your description.
@@JanusCycle I still have it in my collection of a lot of Palm Pilots. I need to 3D print new buttons and put a new Li-Ion battery into it, I'll get to it one day.
@@JanusCycle You tempted me into doing the repairs now, so I opened it up. Battery was as expected completely dead, I tried my old Li-Ion tricks to bring it back to life, but its totally shorted,
What I further did was to connect the terminals to my Lab Power Supply, and the unit works just fine. Lights up, goes through the calibration process, and the screen is gorgeous.
I'm glad it's still working at least. I'm keeping my eye out for one now.
I used to have a clié sj22 (I think) as my first sony pda. I bought the headphone adapter immediately and had a pretty cool digital music player akin to my old handspring pda's. Good times!😊
I use a CLIÉ SL10 (same form factor, but no white backlight) to play a Japanese card game (Hanafuda Koi-Koi) which only works on monochrome devices. It's on PalmDB.
This is my favorite channel, explains everything in great detail. I always look forward to your videos. Follower from Vietnam 🥰🥰🥰🥰
Thank you! Hi to everyone watching in Vietnam :)
thank u for such a comfy video. I'll be waiting for the next videos with impatiens
Great stuff, I'll do my best for something new.
Awesome vídeo as usual
thank you :)
Have several Palms and Clie including the color ones. Enjoyed the Sony ones much more. I remember spending MUCH time with these devices. Having from an HP41 and TI86 background. 🙂
Never knew this Clié has a greyscale screen because of the high resolution. Interesting and gorgeous screen indeeed.
Great video. I was a big user of Palm devices back in the day, especially the Sony CLIÉ devices. I started with a used Palm V, before moving on to a few different CLIÉs, but eventually settled on the NX70V for several years, until I left PalmOS for BlackBerry.
Re: your comment that the SJ20 seemed to be a low-end product, just as a general guide:
The S/SL/SJ series was the entry level, T/TJ/TG/TH were the "workhorse" midrange devices, and the N/NR/NX/NZ were the high-end. The UX were the oddballs, more targeted towards being style-concious (although most of the CLIÉs blurred that line a bit, especially the NX and NZ). The VZ leaned entirely into the style/entertainment/consumer category as a halo product that tried (and failed) to redifine the PalmOS market.
Very nice set of devices you had. I'm looking forward to seeing more CLIÉ models up close.
If it's really the case that it doesn't have any special hardware to help with the graphics then it's really impressive that they managed to render four times the pixels without a significant impact on performance, they were basically stretching the hardware and software as far as it could go. And that's a really nice looking screen, back in the days of monochrome LCDs it was rare to see a device with a backlight display that looked that nice, even if the ghosting is a bit too noticeable for modern sensibilities.
MB86Lxxx looks like RF Transceiver Family of Fujitsu,
MB87L is close enough. It maybe RF related.
Edit: MB87L2250 is "MPEG2 Transport, Video and
Audio Decoder with integrated 32-Bit RISC CPU" from 1998. It can be related to that.
MB87L2070 is a "QAM Demodulator" from 1999
Would be kinda cool if you could get your hands on a Xperia Pureness. I'd love to see it from your perspective..
15:59 Neelix being the third wheel? What a way to close out this video.
Sony devices in the 90s and early 2000s had this futuristic tech wonderland feel. They made these tiny machines brimming with ports and neat features. This minimalist Apple future that we have now really sucks. Even with the slab phone design there is a lot of room for variety that no one takes advantage of. I'd love more ports or how about one of those side toggle switches!? They would be great for scrolling websites and reading ebooks.
Check out the Psion 5 and hp lx 300 series. The higher end models have some insane contrast ratio :)
Psion 5 for sure. I'm always looking for more devices.
This is an amazing channel. Thank you so much for your work. God bless…
I really appreciate hearing this. I'm looking forward to making many more videos :)
I had a Clie SJ-20 when I was a kid! I saved up my allowance forever so I could have some kind of portable computer, since I had to travel 4 hours between my parents every 2 weeks.
Janus, mediaQ was used only in sony clies for 4.1, like N and NR series. NX and NZ uses neomagic chip for acceleration
Very interesting, thanks!
@@JanusCycle ur welcome
Neat! I remember one of my small laptops used a NeoMagic GPU.
@@justinmohns8279 yep, there was a time when neomagic was one of major options for 2d acceleration
I remember this one, it was a gorgeous little device
That fujitsu IC is a video and audio decoder with an integrated 32bit RISC CPU, fast transfer and manipulation of image and sound data, and a many other related functionalities. It was released in the mid to late 90s.
Except that chip you mention has a different number on it. I can't find anything definitive about this specific numbered chip.
I just found a Palm TX on eBay for pretty cheap, along with a new battery. I didn't know they were on eBay until watching this video and deciding to find out what the last true Palm PDAs were, and well, one fell in my shopping basket 😅
I have a broken T5 and M100 in a display cabinet, but I think having a working one could be cool.
I had a IIIx at university, then later a Tapwave Zodiac.
Nice score there. I'm envious you had a Tapwave Zodiac. They sound awesome.
@@JanusCycle it was a cool device, but like most niche devices it barely had any software that took advantage of the extra controls and hardware. It was still really just a PalmOS device unless you could find the few games.
It was still very cool though, I had it in my car as an mp3 player for a while.
So excited for you to get to the Clie UX50!
I don't have one of those. But hopefully I will when I get there.
Love the outro mate!
these were great . i remember the quality.
What a great video!
Hey, thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed this.
9:40 that game reminds me of Elasto Mania, something I played a lot as a kid.
Dulu perangkat ini di indonesia khusus bagi para pengguna kantoran atau bisnis,tapi saya beruntung bisa menikmati perangkat seperti palm os ini.
Sony is always making unique technological innovations .. 😮
I have a PEG-SL10. That's a cheaper model, but according to reviews from back then it has the same LCD, only with a worse backlight behind it. It also takes AAAs instead of having an internal lithium battery, which I consider a benefit since you don't have to worry about the factory battery having died in the past 20 years. All in all they're both good devices and among the best of the classic 68000 Palms.
The unknown fujitsu chip might be a fpga of sort which implements the dpi conversion functionality.
Why the Palm Vx? The m500 is a significantly better device in every possible way.
For what it's worth, the Handera 330 also has a 320x320 pixel grayscale display.
The EL backlight on Palms wears out and gets dim with time. It was not always so dim, and the m500 has an improved backlight as well.
You should try Secret of the Orb Gold Edition, its one of the best monochrome Palm games, and it does a lot of programming tricks for performance. The Handera 330 deals with it perfectly fine, but despite collecting Palm devices, I always avoided the Sony devices as much as possible. I'd be curious to know if it works properly.
This is an excellent question! I would love a m500 and I've been looking for one for a long time. I agree that in general it has better qualities over the Vx.
The answer might come down to more personal and subjective things like my leather wallet won't fit on the m500 and the shape of the Vx just being slightly more aesthetically pleasing to me.
Thanks for the game tip. I'm checking that one out now!
Wah perangkat nostalgia,,, dulu saya pengguna palm os.. Dengan kartu inject alias kartu CDMA di tanam..
I'm glad you enjoying this, thanks!
I still have one...the flip cover has basically disintegrated but it otherwise still works. Good GameBoy emulation device.
I have an SJ20, and a Palm Tungsten E2 still. The E2 came with that rare Palm folding IR keyboard, which I also still have. The Palm has lots of neat software on it, is overclocked from 200Mhz to 333Mhz, has 2GB SD card limit removed so can use large SD cards. Has Little John Palm, Quake, Doom...Bejeweled. I used the E2 way more than the Clie, as you can tell.
Nice overclock you have there.
i used to have a sony peg-ux50, regretted selling it. love that thing, and its so expensive now
That's a really intriguing model. And yes, quite expensive such that I may not get a chance to try it.
Instant subscribe, love me some retro devices. 🤖
Awesome, thank you :)
And people complain about iPhone with 800x1700 pixels being "low" resolution. Sure, it's like 16 years newer than this one, but our eyes aren't getting any better.
I had a CLIE PEG SL10-E, the battery you installed may fry it at some point, if above ~3.3V, as that's what happened with mine. On a 3.0V discharged battery, it powered on, used it for a few hours, had to charge it, of course it was 3.6V, it blew up.
Maybe because the SL-10 uses AAA batteries, but the SJ20 is made for a li-ion cell?
I had the clie peg-nx70v. It was a great NES and SNES emulator. Also, gamer. You could use the keyboard to play games.
i lovrd my pda life back in the day , I had a clie , a palm pilot , a tapwave zodiac , some windows CE devices , I used my zodiac until the first netbook arrived the asus eeepc 701 , that changed everything , I could run Morrowind on it
It's impressive that Sony pushed the DragonBall Palm OS beyond it's limits.
not really, if you go back to first Macintosh it had the OG MC68000 clocked at 1/4 frequency pushing almost double resolution (granted 1bit instead of 4) with no graphics chip whatever and just 128KB RAM. Now that was pushing the limits...
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I meant specifically from the DragonBall-based Palm OS devices, not the 68K architecture in general.
@@deliternity I understand, but the DragonBall is miniaturized re-packed MC68000 (with some added on die features like graphics controller, direct DRAM access etc.), so I dont see where did SONY pushed the DragonBall beyond its limits.
I think the Fujitsu MB87L4631 is some sort of custom version of video/audio decoder chip with build in RISC cpu. Like the MB87L2250, where u find datasheets online.
I do wonder if it is video related. I can't think of what else it could be doing in there.
13:25 Now I'm curious how well a black-and-white Popeye cartoon plays on here
PalmOS 5 games review would be awesome
15:14 Are you synchronizing it with a modern computar? If yes, how are you doing it?
There is a 64 bit Palm Hotsync driver that works on Windows 11. But there is a problem with profile names between the Hotsync Manager and the driver. It took me hours of fiddling to get this working. Then it stopped again.
I remember when this first came out.
This was a good one. I'm gonna break out my Tungsten TX and play with it!
Nice model there!
Welcome to the Palm, Palm-machines, Palm-a-like, Palm Beach channel!
4:35 I think that's a type of surface mount piezo buzzer
Yes, I do thing you are correct there.
What is that epaper/eink device at the 04:22 mark?
Yotaphone 2, rear side.
I had the same question!
Beautiful little thing! Thanks!
I really miss PDA devices, hoping to get one ordered soon.
Hi, the large component with the dot is the speaker,
I have come across LCD modules with MediaQ chips on the LCD module itself so maybe it something that is true here as well
It does seem like a speaker now. MediaQ on the LCD directly? Now that's interesting.
16 minutes since posting lets gooo
What Eink phone is that @4:22? Very interesting, I have been look for a usable eink phone can do basic web browsing
This is a Yotaphone 2 with eink on the back. I'm looking for a newer eink phone to use these days.
I have a palm iiic that I had to replace the worn out backlight using bits and pieces from both my original and a parts unit. Next up on my repair list is the broken power button and the worn out battery. I also need to locate my stylus that fell somewhere on the floor days ago.
I hope you are able to get it working.
@@JanusCycle it has been functional this whole time. The backlight swap was to handle how orange the background was getting. As for the broken power button it still works just requires a bit of force as part of the plastic button had disappeared after it had been disassembled. As for the battery it holds a charge but not for more than an hour or two
Have you used Yota phone eink screen to read datasheet?
Where did you find the ending song? I see you have it in the description but I cant seem to find that specific version anywhere!
A nice take of this song
ruclips.net/video/1EbkA7CctVk/видео.html
@@JanusCycle Thank you!
4:22 is that a still working Yotaphone 2?! Mine died a while ago and i miss it dearly, I'm jealous
yep, great phone. Sorry to hear yours is gone.
What is the device being used at 4:25?
It's the back of a Yotaphone 2
@@JanusCycle oh I have not seen one of those for years, do you still daily driver it?
In modern time I want to buy it again
This is so cool...
The video playback on these devices feels like the original VideoNow.
I'm 99% sure there's no GPU or "hardware assistance". They simply rewrote the standard graphics functions to work with doubled pixels (and the text routines to use the high-res fonts regardless, just at pixel-doubled *positions*). A 33MHz 68000 had enough power to deal with that.
There were some apps that were incompatible with the OS4 Cliés, and those were presumably the ones that did stuff with the LCD controller or framebuffer directly, bypassing the OS routines. Those would have had their 160x160 assumptions broken.
I'm also leaning to this all being done in software. If the CPU had enough power, then why did Sony include a GPU in OS4 Cliés? I would like to get one to compare this.
That reminds me of e-ink,, before e-ink. I used to have that Clie....£20 at a carboot sale; dead battery :)
Pretty much everything, yeah.
Hey 09:19 is Star Trek Voyager with Nelix, Belanna, and I thikn Tom Paris??? FELLOW VOYAGER FAN HERE!!!!!!!
Well done seeing that in the negative. I also included a positive view of that photo in the very last shot. Voyager is the best!
04:35 That's the speaker!
yep, I think you're right!
Hi from R. of Moldova, i like prod Made in Japan.
Thanks for watching, I'm pleased you enjoyed this.
Every single Clie I've seen online has been absurdly priced lmao
I usually run eBay searches and wait patiently, sometimes for years. Eventually some models appear for better prices.
1:48
unbelievable but truth is, sony doing the same thing in their flagship Android 4k display phones .
I'm still in my 20s, but I miss those days of diverse tech that constantly gave people unique experiences, it was so much more fun compared to the same boring mass-produced Android/iOS devices we have now every year. It's ironic that no one talked about "diversity" back then, but there was more of it in every part of our lives.
Today the innovation is all happening in software. Hardware has indeed become just another self similar commodity.
@@JanusCycle The problem with modern software is that most of it is poorly optimized, often lags even on high-end processors, and takes up too much space. Older hardware required developers to manage limited resources efficiently, but most programmers today just don't care about that.
I'd be very interested to see what you do with these devices as EDC. what software do you use o get the most out of these? do you use them for the original uses, contacts and calendars, or is there some newer software that let you do more modern things?
My Palm Vx has mostly been text based with occasional games. Every day carry is an important subject and worth doing more in a video.
Clie devices were so posh. Frankly I really like Sony's design language of that era.
Also that 'power device' is the speaker/beeper. Hm, come to think of it - never bothered taking apart my SJ22, boy the screen on that thing was tack sharp after original palm.
Just think we now have 33.2 million pixels
could we get a video about motorla rarz v3-v3i? I got one, that was my childhood phone ugh I was dying to get one as a child, and I just want to explore it's full capabilities before the 2g network shut downs here. please I guess you are the only channel do these type of things on this platform.
The V3i can do some amazing unexpected things. I don't have one yet so not sure when. But a video must happen!
Clie is god tier. If you were next gen cool, you had a Clie.