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From the article, the design “mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists”

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Yeah, and the article also quotes IMAX as stating "IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator".

You can certainly have a true emulator that also "mimics the look and feel" of the thing it's emulating.

If you have any actual evidence that the IMAX tool is not truly an emulator other than conjecture, we'd all be very interested.

There are PalmOS emulators out there, wouldn't make sense for them to roll their own instead of licensing one of those. I had one on my last Android phone that was a treat for using my beloved old Palm apps.

I suspect the HN crowd's interpretation is correct that they merely replicated the look and feel. Which makes sense - Palm is still the best GUI I've ever been fortunate enough to use.

It's likely that whatever emulators already existed didn't support whatever custom hardware is in place to interface the Palm Pilot with the IMAX projection hardware.

Fair enough. But I still can't seeing them committing the resources to build an emulator from scratch. It would take ages to achieve stability and work out all the bugs. Anyone doing this would go find a platform that's already 85% of the way there and tailor to fit.

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