The Palm OS Emulator (POSE) is a software program that runs on your PC, and acts in almost every way just like your Palm OS hardware device. It consists of two components:

• The emulator program simulates the hardware.
• A ROM image file contains the Palm Operating System that you will need to use the emulator.

The emulator software program and installation instructions are available from the PalmSource Web site at http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/emulator/.

POSE is an excellent way to get acquainted with SP right on your desktop, so you can try it out even without having a real Palm device. This section describes the steps to get to that setup.

An alternative to POSE are the Palm Simulators http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/simulator/. In contrast to POSE, the Palm Simulators (available for both Palm OS Garnet and Palm OS Cobalt devices) do NOT simulate hardware. They do however support high resolution devices and in general look better then POSE. Most of the screenshots made in this manual are made with either POSE or one of the Palm Simulators.

Follow the link above to download the Palm Emulator. POSE is available for Macintosh, Unix, or Windows-based desktop computer. You need to sign up for free account to get to the downloads. You can also download a suitable ROM image from the Palm developers site or use the procedure as described in the PDF user manual that comes with the POSE installation kit to download the ROM of an actual Palm device to a ROM file using the ROM Transfer.prc tool that is also provided in the kit. Palm OS Emulator supports transferring ROM images over a USB connection. To use a USB connection, Palm OS Emulator needs the USB driver support provided by the Palm Desktop software. Using Palm OS Emulator On Windows, you need to have Palm Desktop 4.0.1 or later installed to get the USB driver. You must make the library for the USB driver (the file USBPort.dll) available to Emulator. Either copy this file from the Palm Desktop software’s directory to the Emulator directory, or move it into the Windows system directory. On Macintosh, you need to have Palm Desktop 2.6.3 or later installed to get the USB driver.

Optionally you can download “Skins” (again from the Palm Developers site) to make the emulator look like a real Palm III, Palm V, Visor, etc. You need to place the skin files in a (new) sub-directory called “Skins” in the directory where you’ve installed POSE.

The next dialog will show when you start POSE for the first time:

Use the ‘New’ button and configure the ROM, Skins, etc. A sample can be seen below:

Click Ok should result in something like:

• There are more elaborate howto’s for POSE setup to be found online, or simply read the POSE user manual that is included in the installation kit. This wiki is about Soaring Pilot and not about POSE, remember

• People may ask “why the difficult procedure, why not make a ready made POSE + SP download?”. The reason is the copyright on the ROM images.

• But what about the Palm Simulators then? Sorry, license to distribute is only US $5,000.00...

1. Right click in POSE and select “Settings” » “Properties”.
2. Ensure the “Redirect NetLib calls to host TCP/IP” checkbox is checked.
3. Enter a “HotSync User Name” (such as “POSE”). Click “OK”.
4. Open HotSync in POSE
5. Select “Modem Sync Prefs” from the HotSync “Options” menu (click lower left silk-screen button to access menu’s)
6. Ensure the “Network” option is selected. Click “OK”.
7. Under the “Modem Sync” icon in HotSync will be displayed ‘Select service”. Click this and select anything from “Service” popup. It doesn’t matter what you select here. Don’t worry about user names or passwords either. Click “Done”
8. Select “Primary PC Setup” from the HotSync “Options” menu.
9. Enter as much info in this dialog as you know. If you don’t know any of this simply enter “127.0.0.1” (without quotes!) into the “Primary PC Address” field. Click “OK”.
10. Right click the HotSync icon in your PC’s system tray and ensure that the “Network” option is checked.

• Make sure the HotSync Manager is running.
• Right-click the HotSync Manager icon in the system tray, and enable “Network” in the pop up menu.

That should be about it. If you now open HotSync in POSE and click the “Modem HotSync” icon POSE should initiate a HotSync session with your PC. You’ll be asked to create a new Palm Desktop user by the Hotsync Manager. Click the “New” button and enter “POSE” as the user name.

Once you have POSE to boot and HotSync®, you need to install Soaring Pilot. POSE supports drag-and-drop, so the easiest way to do that, is to simply drop the required files soaring.prc and MathLib.prc into POSE. But you can also follow the installation procedure as a dry-run. Next, configure Soaring Pilot, install waypoints and SUA, using the DOC transfer method as described in this manual. A good place to start is SoarPilot Basics. If you already own a Palm device with SP installed you can also simply HotSync® your SP databases from the Backup directory on your PC/Mac.

Final step is to feed Soaring Pilot running in POSE some NMEA data stream. This can be accomplished by using the MixW Serial Bridge driver to create a virtual null-modem between two (also virtual) COM ports on your PC, say COM5 and COM6. Some software may not support such high COM port numbers (sometimes only COM1, COM2, COM3 and COM4 can be selected), in that case pick COM3 and COM4 but always make sure there is no real hardware COM port already occupying that address!

Setup POSE to use one end of such a COM pair:

Start SeeYou and in “Tools” menu select “Options...”. In the Options dialog, select “Animation” in the “Flight” tree. Here you can enable NMEA output and select a COM port. Pick the other side of the COM pair:

Screen shot made with SeeYou 2.82, your Options dialog may look different.

Make sure to set the “Animation rate” in SeeYou to 1x, otherwise Soaring Pilot may get confused by the rapid position changes... Finally, start SP in POSE, load a flight in SeeYou and start animation. If all went well, you should see the flight being played back into Soaring Pilot and you can step through the various screens to get acquainted with their workings. All this without any real hardware, without danger in the safety of your living room!

If you don’t own a copy of SeeYou, you can use free or cheaper alternatives that also generate a usable NMEA output stream, see Links page for suggestions. Another excellent way to get to learn using SP is to “fly” SP in POSE attached to a soaring simulator like “Sailors of the Sky” or “Condor”, both support NMEA output.

— Antoine 2006/06/22