Dear Lazyweb,

Is it really the case that there is no way to emulate or develop for a color version of PalmOS on MacOS X?

I'd like to be wrong about this, but I think the answer is "yes", and that:

1. Only the PalmOS "Emulator" runs on OSX (not the PalmOS "Simulator");
2. Only the "Simulator" can run ROMs of version 5 or newer;
3. Only the 5.x ROMs do color;
4. Only the 5.x ROMs are ARM based (earlier ROMs are 68k);
5. Therefore, development on a Mac (or Linux?) can only result in emulated, 68K non-color binaries.

Is all that true? Say it ain't so.

Update: Apparently the 3.5 ROMs can do color, but Palm never distributed development ROMs that corresponded to a color device! So you can only do color if you've sucked the right ROMs out of a physical color 3.5 - 4.0 device.

The other items seem to be true: the "Simulator" doesn't fake the hardware, it is a port of the whole of PalmOS to Windows NT: the Garnet microkernel is replaced with NT's kernel, and the OS source was recompiled for x86. So MacOS and Linux are dead as development platforms for modern Palm apps.