Psion Series 3c

The Psion Series 3c emulator seems to be the Psion community's most closely guarded secret. I wasn't even aware that there was a 3c emulator available until I received a nice e-mail from Stephen Stone in California, USA, who not only told me about it, he also e-mailed me a zipped copy of it.

Stephen kindly pointed me to Joop's website in the Netherlands, where he downloaded the emulator.

According to Joop, the English version of the emulator is not terribly robust. Certainly, when I have run the emulator under MS-DOS on an old Dell 486/DX-2 50 with 18MB RAM and tried to use the diamond key (F12) to toggle the display of the memory bar it returns an error: SYS$SHLL.$05 "Process exited, Exit number 10", which indicates that there is no system memory. Which is ludicrous!

Joop's workaround was to install the Belgian version of the emulator, which is much more stable, and copy the English language dependent modules EPOC.RMI and EPOC.DLL to the new installation. (I've tried this, and I still got the same error! In fact, I also get this error when I am running the Belgian version with the Belgian language modules.)

Given the less-than-robust nature of the Series 3c emulator it may be advisable to develop any OPL software on the 3a emulator.

The Series 3c emulator is useful for developing, or testing, software for the Series 3a, Series 3c and Series 3mx. These machines are very similar, although the Series 3a -- and therefore also this emulator -- lacks support for IrDA and BackLight.

MS-DOS ONLY
The emulator will ONLY run under a true DOS environment, and not a shell to DOS from within Windows. It is recommended that you SUBST the M, A and B drives. Instructions are given in the installation text file, and there is an example BAT file to download and edit.

Manual Install
For those more familiar with MS-DOS, SUBST commands and editing BAT files I have provided a standard Zip file containing the emulator files which you can install wherever you please.

	Download Series 3C English (1.49 MB Zip)
	Download Series 3C Belgian (1.31 MB Zip)
	EXAMPLE.BAT Sample batch file (2 KB) Note: you must edit this for your own setup

{^top}

I received the following emails from Joop:

"There is a workaround for the memory problem. Most of it has to do with dos which is compiled with a compiler which can not address more than 64Mb of memory. Almost sure you have more!, so read my tips how to handle that. The emulator 3c runs fine on my machines, it's only less robust than the 3a, probably due to the build in filemanager which has to deal with the pc environment. I use a multiboot system, so you can't present a more ugly (in the sence of filesystems!) system to the Psion emulator.

I do have also English, Dutch, German and French 3a systems, a 3 classic in Dutch and English. A while ago I patched the Dutch emulator for use with a Dutch keyboard."

The English machine can only handle 1 (one) screenprint, the next will overwrite the first.

The Belgium version however works the same as the 3a, so you have room for 99 screenprints before the first is overwritten. Your memory problem with the diamond key does indeed appear in both machines.

However I get the feeling that the Belgium version is a little more robust than the English one when I take the amount of system crashes in account. There is a memory workaround, but that's not the trick with changing files. You have to read the documentation found with menuchoice 0. Be informed that I'm busy with a new setup of my site and the docs about the emulators is updated again. It will all be in 8.3 format so I can change between Windows, OS/2. eCS, DOS, who knows...and see if the pages do work correctly in the browsers.

I walked through your site, found that I'm no longer alone with more emulators in different languages, sad... Some links don't work anymore. Psion has a new setup of their site with less support for the Series 3x. The site with the millennium PsiWin 3.11 is gone. So we have to stick together in keeping our Psions alive for as long as it goes. My 3a is 9 years old! and still running happy. I'm also still developping for the 3x, only I don't have the sdk's from Psion (the big manuals which come with speed c).

So some parts will go terribly slow with try and error.

Gr Joop"