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10月5日 New purpose for E-200 pocket pcWell, I did something this summer I
thought I would never do. I got a laptop. Yes, that is right. Mr. PDA
bought a laptop. It was an oldie that I just threw Linux on, but for
awhile after I got it the PDA was rarely used. Now that the novelty
of the laptop has wore off a bit I do find myself using the PDA
again, but not as much as I used to. This is for two reasons: 1) the
laptop is better suited for typing long documents and web surfing on
average 2) my phone allows for HTML browsing and instant messaging on
the go. 9月14日 ChangesThere will be changes taking place over the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled. The website will be getting an overhaul and the netcast may resume(crossing fingers on this one).
2月19日 Playing Quake on my E-200I was playing Quake recently on my Cassiopeia E-200 and decided to capture some video of it in action. Even thought Quake has been available for the Pocket PC for free(at least the shareware version is) for years now under the name PocketQuake. Not many Pocket PC owners I encounter even realize it. Those that I tell about it tend to look at me with disbelief and many seem to have concerns about how that would be controllable on a touch screen based device since the game was originally designed for mouse and keyboard. This video should showcase just how this is possible. 2月2日 Diggnation + Pocket PC + TCPMP = EntertainmentLately I have been watching diggnation episodes I have missed. I am subscribed to the Theora feed from their page but I decided to try the Small Xvid downloads. To my surprise they work great on even my aging E-200 without the need to re-encode the files. Playing the small xvid version of the show using TCPMP (Open Source media player for PDAs) is seemless and smooth. No stuttering, articfacts, Audio/video sync loss or anything else that would ruin the video watching experience. This is great news since a lot of video content I download has to be converted using something like PocketDiVX Encoder to play smoothly. Since Diggnation requires no such encoding I can just throw it on the SD card and head out the door. Here is a pic of Diggnation Episodes #53 playing:
1月24日 Playing Spawn on my Pocket PCI have been playing Spawn on my PDA recently, and it reminds how powerful these things are. My Pocket PC is running this game which looks like it has graphics matching that of some of the early PlayStation1 3D games with no slow downs or glitches. Appluad that. Take a look for yourself: 1月19日 No power for weeks = no PDA :)Well I have not touched my PDA in weeks, and that means I have nto charged it either. What does this mean? It means that my PDA is dead and my data is wiped out. Many of you who have newer PDAs do not have this issue. Some Windows Mobile 2003 models and all Windows Mobile 5 models store their data in flash so that even if the device loses all power, it will still be there. Well my Casio Cassiopeia E-200 runs Pocket PC 2002 so no such luck for me. Not a problem though, I did want to hard reset it and start a new anyway. Here is my E-200, dead as a door nail: As soon as I plugged the thing in it lit right up. As if it was happy to finally see electricity again. E-200 once plugged in: The last thing I had done as far as customizing this unit was giving it the look of Window Mobile Crossbow. That picture was based off of early leaked pictures of it. I think I will keep the polished, glossy look of Crossbow but I will add a color scheme of my choosing this time. 11月7日 Pocket PC 2002 with a Windows Mobile 6 lookThere have been a lot of screen shots appearing around the web of what is rumored to be the next version of Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile 6. These shots show the devices looking very much like Windows Mobile 5 in terms of layout and structure, but the main visible difference is that the glossy look and icons has been applied to the interface. So everything has a very Vista-ish look to it. I decided to try and give my E-200 a face lift using the Pocket Facelift application I have installed. This application gives you the ability to change the appearance of both the taskbar and the New button menu at the bottom. It also allows all of the icons to be skinned. I have yet to finish creating the new Icons, I hit a road block with those, but I have applied the glososy look to the device. Thanks to some of the hard work being done over at the forums for Wisbar I was able to get a theme that matches the background in some of the leaked Windows Mobile 6 snapshots as well some pictures of the glossy gradient. Using Pocketfacelift I pieced those items together to get the results that can be seen in the snapshots I included with this post. As you can see, most of the Windows Mobile 6 glossy look as been applied. I am currently using the pocketKDE icons instead of Windows Mobile 6 ones. I also do not have the soft buttons at the bottom menu bar. I have yet to find an application that will apply those to Pocket PC 2002. If anyone knows of any please feel free to leave a comment letting me know. I will try to get full details to recreate what I have done as well as supply all the needed files once I have completed the look transformation. In the mean time all comments are welcome, good or bad. The bad ones let me know I have more work to do, the good ones let me know that I am heading in the right direction. 2月7日 Got my BE again, made it look like WM5My sister handed back my be-300 this weekend. It is now useless to her
because it no longer holds a charge well. While it may not be very
mobile anymore, it is still fun to modify. I loaded up the most recent
version of Bas Be-Shell from be300.org and applied the windows Mobile 5
theme made by grayducK1. Now it's hard to tell that it's not WM5 at
first glance. I'm sure the guys at BAS will have it looking exact very
soon at this rate. All the really needs to be done is to change the
today screen app icons to the wm5 one's to complete the look of the
today screen. I have included pictures of my BE looking like WM5. I think I should discuss this in my next podcast, and maybe even have grayduck1 on as a guest to discuss this graphic overhaul of the BE's GUI(graphical user interface). 2月1日 Overclocking the E-200Over the weekend I felt a little experimental and decided to see if I could get more power from my E-200. For this I downloaded Jimmy Software's JS Overclock. It is available for free at http://www.jimmysoftware.com or www.pocketpcfreewares.com. The program was originally intended for Ipaqs but it seems to work for most StrongArm based Pocket PCs. The program is a simple exe that you just transfer to your pda. Once on your handheld you just run it and it will give you all the different speeds you can set the CPU of your device too. Speed options range from 162-236MHz. At 236MHz I noticed a difference of a 20% improvement on the TCPMP benchmark. I also noticed significant improvements in emulation, especially with Gameboy Advanced, Genesis and SNES emulators. For saving power I underclock my unit to 162MHz. This really comes in handy for my longer classes where I have bluetooth active. 1月29日 Bluetooth working as it shouldYesterday I was heading out and I wanted to carry my pocket pc in case I needed to pull up directions while on the go. I also did not want a lot of bulk to carry around. As you may have noticed from previous pictures, my E-200 is twice as thick with the expansion pack on and this is what I classify as bulk. So I decided to try the E-200 and the bluetooth card in the compact flash slot alone and it worked!!!
Not sure why it did not work before when directly plugged into the companct flash slot, but it works now.
It does not even have any of the wierd backlight interference issues that users of early model E-200s complain of. So apparently whatever was causing the card not to work before was purely a software issue and not the same hardware issue that early E-200s had.
I'm happy about this cause this comes in handy when I need to travel light.
One thing to note however is that I only managed to get 3 hours of usage on the device yestereday without the expansion sled. I'm used to get more time than this with the expansion sled due to the fact that it adds an extra battery.
I may have gotten more time out of it if I didn't play Mario, Bejeweled 2 and an episode of Digital Life TV on it....lol.
So for all Casio Cassiopeia E-200 users with a serial number that has 5AP in it, you can use the Belkin bluetooth cards in the Compact Flash slot without worry. 1月20日 Addicted to Bejeweled 2I have been playing bejeweled 2 for a couple of week on my E-200 now and I must say that I am addicted to it. This game has pulled me in and will not let go. Any of you who have played it on PC probably knows the feeling. This game plays very well on a Pocket PC and seems to addict anyone who plays it, just like it's PC counter part. Even my girlfriend is addicted. Just about anytime I have my E-200 with me and I'm not using it she will kidnap my E-200 and start up Bejeweled 2. We are even trying to beat each others high scores at this point. If I find the time I will post a full review on the Reaper PC/PDA forum. The pic I took of the game in action was with my Sony Ericsson T610 cell phone. So ti may not look at it's best due to bad lighting conditions and the fact taht it was a quick shot that I did not even bother to edit with Photo Shop to try and clean up. As with teh review, if I have more time I will post better pics. 1月12日 Appluad the power of BluetoothIn my last post I mentioned that I would give more info on the bluetooth card I was using. It is a Belkin F8T006 Bluetooth PDA and PC Adapter Combo Card. It works fine for me but only in the PCMCIA/USB expansion sled. Some of the Casio Cassiopeia units are known for having issues with their Compact Flash Type II slots and wireless Compact flash devices. I unfortuantely ended up with one of these units. It's a good thing that the card came with the PC Card adapter, so I was able to use the card in my PCMCIA slot. This turned out to be for the best though since I only have a 128MB Compact flash card so now I can use the Bluetooth card and memory card at the same time. Also the expansion sled contains an extra battery which helps out greatly since I doubt I would get about 4 hours of constant bluetooth use on the E-200's battery by itself. So even if I was lucky enough to get a 7BP units, these had no CF issues like in earlier units, I would probably end up using the card in teh PCMCIA slot anyway. Getting the Bluetooth card not took care of one of my New Years Resolutions but it took out 2 by allowing me to sync with my PC(FINALLY!!!). To install the bluetooth drivers I had to connect via USB to a friends computer but after the card was up and running I had no problem connecting with my PC via Bluetooth to sync. So if any of you out there are like me, meaning your PDA will not sync via USB for unknown reasons, then try a wireless method such as bluetooth or WiFi(not available in ActiveSync 4.0 or higher). Needless to say I'm liking bluetooth and I currently see no need for WiFi. As it stands I can go online in any location where I have cell phone signal. That gives me a great deal more connectivity than WiFi since I would be limited to the short range of WiFi routers. Maybe someday i will see the need to add WiFi to my pda but not now. 1月8日 One resolution completeWell I already got one of my PDA New Years Resolutions taken care of. I got a bluetooth card for my E-200. As I type this I am on my E-200 using ftxPBrowser(allows for tabbed web browsing) while connected to the Internet through my Sony Ericsson T610 via bluetooth. I'm glad I got. This truely makes my E-200 a well rounded mobile computing platform. I will talk more about the specifics on the card another time. 1月3日 Happy New Year!!Happy New Year Everyone!!
2005 is over and now we have a whole new year of PDA goodness awaiting us.
I thought it would be interesting to have a PDA New Years Resolution list.
So I'm going to post mine here. Feel free to share yours in the comments to this post or in the forum.
madreaper's New Year's Resolution 06:
Well that's my list. I wonder how much of that I will get done before 2007? I guess time will tell. 12月30日 Older handhelds still willing and ableI read an interesting article, a couple of days ago, at www.brighthand.com that discusses the fact that older handhelds are still very good and it is not a necessity for most to go out a buy a brand new handheld.
I have found this true since I moved one from my first PDA(a Casio Cassiopeia BE-300 Pocket Manager). Due to my budget I had to find a PDA that meet my needs and at the time that was a Cassiopeia E-115 which had the extra RAM(32MB instead of the BE's 16MB) and an Ir DA port(to connect with my Sony Ericsson T-610 cell phone for internet access). The E-115 still meets my needs to this day but my girlfriend was willing to get me anything I wanted for my birthday and that's where my wants kicked in. I didn't want to put a hole in her pocket so again I looked for a unit that was not brand new but still had some great features. This landed me with a Cassiopeia E-200. Not the newest of pdas by far but one of the most expandable out there. The E-200 was a major step up form my E-115, it had: a 206MHz StrongARM CPU(E-115 had 131MHz MIPs CPU), 64MB of RAM/62.57MB usable(E-115 had 32MB/31.88MB usable), Compact Flash Type II & SD/MMC slots(E-115 only had Compact Flash Type II), USB host support, an optional sled(added an extra battery, PCMCIA slot, and a USB port). With all those features I really do not find myself wanting another PDA anymore as this one currently exceeds even my needs. If there is any feature I want that is currently not there, all I have to do is add via one of the expansion slots. This currently being bluetooth which I do not need a whole new handheld for since I can add bluetooth via PCMCIA or Compact Flash(if anyone knows where I can get a bluetooth card for under $40 please let me know).
I guess this is all just my take on the issue of newer versus older handhelds. If you have a different view on this please feel free to comment. Here is the link to the article I read: "In Praise of Older Handhelds" 12月25日 Happy Holidays - PicoDrive a day laterMERRY CHRISTMAS
&
HAPPY HAPPYLIDAYS!!
Well I have had more time to play with PicoDrive and my first impressions were a little off. While there is no change in performance, I must correct myself on my statements about the emulators options. The Save Movie and Load Movie options I mentioned are not for actually recording gameplay, but they are for Saving and Loading your game states(save games). I guess I was thrown off by the title of the options since most emulators call these option Save State and Load State. Well with these options I must say that this program is complete, the only thing that could possibly be added is Network Play so multiplayer would be possible. This is not a big issue though. I have only seen one Pocket PC emulator with this option so far. I guess it is not as popular on Pocket PCs as it is on PC. 12月24日 Genesis on my E-200Well I've made it no secret that I like to use emulators on my Pocket PCs. Since my recent switch to a E-200 I have yet to set-up all of my classic console emulators on my new unit. This is due in part to the fact that the PocketGenesis emulator does not work on my E-200 even though it had no problem working on my old E-115. Everytime I executed the emulator on my E-200 the unit would do a soft-reset, not good. This was probably due to the fact that PocketGenesis was designed for ARM based IPaqs and MIPs based Cassiopeias. The E-200 is an ARM based Cassiopeia so that explains a little about the issues. It took monthes before I had time to play around with a new emulator again but I finally came across PicoDrive. I've seen it before but did not pay much attention to it till now since all my previous PDAs ran on MIPs processors and this emulator only worked with ARM and ARM type processors. Since I now have a Pocket PC that matches the described requirements, I gave it a try. My reaction to it, WOW! This thing ran flawlessly. This is amazing since I have to enable frame skip on PocketSNES to make the games playable. When I checked through the setting there is no option for frameskip but I doubt there is an ARM based Pocket PC that would. The assembly language based emulation engine that makes up PicoDrive is so efficient that I doubt anyone would have a problem playing games at a smooth frame rate. So far I have played Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage without a problem. They both seem to run at their original frame rates. PicoDrive is not perfect though I'll add pics of the games in action a lil later. If you have an ARM based(Strong ARM, Xscale) processor in your Pocket PC and do not yet have a Genesis emulator, download this one!! |
. The options are very sparse. There is no sound emulation at all and no Save State(for saving games). The one notable option is the ability to take pics and what the author of the program calls movies(whihc is probably some form of recording gamepley. I have yet to try either function but will do once I get hte chance.|
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