>From what little I know, the new simulator is in many ways like the old one:

The old one took advantage of the fact that Macs used to have 68K
processors, and therefore could at least emulator one. It also took
advantage of the fact that PalmOS resources were stored as MacOS resources.
The result was something that ran much faster than the emulator, ran only on
the Mac, and acted like one generic device rather than emulating all the
details of any one specific real device.

The new one takes advantage of the fact that the CPUs used in PCs have the
same endianness as the ARM. Because the actual processors are different, the
entire OS ends up being compiled into a different instruction set, but the
packing rules and endianness mean you can still access data in the same way.
The result is once again something that runs much faster than the emulator,
but this time it's only on the PC. Sad for us Mac-heads, but all smiles for
the Windows crowd. Again, the simulator acts like one generic device rather
than emulating all the details of any one specific real device.

Because of the approach taken in implementing the new simulator, the code
involved in much more cleanly separated from the core OS. Another advantage
of the new simulator over the old is that it can run multiple applications
rather than being stuck in one. This is a major improvement. You also get
visual tools instead of command line tools for viewing memory and such.
-- 
Peter Epstein

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