Super Emulator Mode

  • Thread starter Thread starter PeterB
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PeterB

Tired of debugging your PocketPC/WinCE application?

Well I am! I have a rather large application and sometimes I need to check
things that requires vast database/form/control initializations. Wouldn't it
be nice to have an emulator with a setting which enables the emulator to use
the entire power of your PC? I have no idea if this is possible but it would
be great to have a 4GHz emulator processor with 1GB RAM. I understand this
wouldn't simulate the PPC to it's full extent but if I just want to try some
GUI or basic functionality this would be awesome!

Any ideas if this would even work? I don't really know how emulators work...

/ Peter
 
The only really accurate way to simulate performance is to use a real
device. The Pocket PC 2003 emulator (Installed with the Pocket PC 2003 SDK)
is slightly improved from the 2002 release which ships with Visual Studio,
but still not comparable with a real device.

Peter
 
Well, that's pretty much what you already have. When the emulator is
running, you've got an instance of Virtual PC running, which, in turn, runs
a copy of Windows CE compiled for the x86. The emulator would, in my
opinion, be completely useless if it wasn't running Windows CE, so this is
as close as you can get without actually running Windows CE on the real
device (it will run on a PC, if you build it to do that). Since 1GB of RAM
is *not* supportable under Windows CE, you won't get any advantage out of
that anyway. The fact that you have vast initialization requirements is a
real problem on the real target device, so I'd address it on that end, not
by making it less painful for the developer!

Paul T.
 
You can go to Task Manager and set the priority of Emulator.exe to High
after it is running (even Real-time, if you don't want to actually do any
debugging, or run any other programs). This won't make much difference in
real performance, though.

Dick

--
Richard Grier (Microsoft Visual Basic MVP)

See www.hardandsoftware.net for contact information.

Author of Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications, 4th
Edition ISBN 1-890422-28-2 (391 pages) published July 2004. See
www.mabry.com/vbpgser4 to order.
 
Yes I know this. But sometimes, like when checking GUI changes, it would be
a great time-saver to have a really fast emulator mode, and when the
emulator show satisfying results you'd test on a real device ofc.

/ Peter
 
All I want is a mode in the emulator where things (form loads, database
inits etc) goes really really fast as if it was run on the PC... As I said,
I am totally unaware of how a emulator works so I may be out of line here...

Let's say I have 4 forms I need to open to get to the last one, but I
require database initializations and decisions made from all previous forms
to display the last (4th) form. The time it takes to get to this form in
order to debug/check simple GUI changes or similar things can be quite
annoying when you have to do it over and over again. As for the user the
time isn't an issue as he'd most likely stop at each screen for some time...
Everything would ofc demand testing on a real device in the end!

Paul, are you saying the emulator actually uses the full power of the PC CPU
or is it choked down to simulate a PPC processor of let's say 400MHz? I'll
accept that it can't use as much RAM as a PC can hold... What's the maximum
RAM limit for Windows CE?

thanks,

Peter
 
Yes, it's running more or less like any other application running under
Windows. It also has to virtualize the entire PC experience, of course, so
device I/O is significantly slower than for a native Win32 application, but
straight line code is running at whatever clock speed the processor is
running at. *No* attempt is made to somehow match the speed of the
processor on a real device (the emulator *could not* know what speed that
would be anyway).

The theoretical maximum is 512MB, but device I/O, which often uses regions
of memory address space eat into that. So, something less than 512MB...

Paul T.
 
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