I am very pleased with the physical size of the Jornada 728. You just can't beat it for portability. That said, I am trying to get the most mileage out of this machine, wanting to use it to its fullest capacity and potential, meeting my various needs.
As you may all know, the Jornada's native opertating system is Windows CE 3.0. One can also run Jlime/Mongo on it, as well as DOS emulators. All this now makes this one computer, basically like having three computers.
(Again, a real plus considering the physical size of the Jornada 728
).
While I have been successful in getting Jlime/Mongo to run DOSBOX, I am still looking for a way to speed this process up a bit and thus I asked Kristoffer for what suggestions he might have.
Here is Kristoffer's response:
The best approach would be to use Linux
(jlime
) as the foundation of the image and then just make all the graphical output go away
(so it boots up with a nice logo and then seamlessly goes into dosbox
).
You can basically turn off everything that you don’t need so they don’t steal memory or cpu time.
You can usually grab about 5-20% extra speed by fiddling with the compilation/memory stuff.
If you know how to compile a kernel then its easy. Just create the logo you want to use
convert it into the kernel logo format. Set the default booting parameter to redirect output to serial.
Then you will end up with a kernel that boots only showing logo. If you make the logo large enough it will cover everything until you reach the login page
(which you sidestep by directly starting
dosbox
).
Google for initparameters, and look into the kernel code
(inside menuconfig
) for
setting logos and default bootparameters.
Kristoffer's comments sound very promising and gives one hope for speed improvement, however I do not have the knowledge necessary in order to accomplish Kristoffer's suggestion.
So, I am posting this message out there to see if there are any Kernel programmers out there that might be able to pull this off.
I think this could be a benefit to others as well, because afterall, those of us that are still using our Jornada's are doing so because we love these machines - and we all want to get the most out of them.
So, if anyone is out there, who has the knowledge to pull this off, and who is up to this challenge, and perhaps has the time to do this, please let me hear from you.
