Having grown up using Psions, I’ve always been somewhat dismissive of Palms and their siblings, but I thought I should finally see what I was missing out on. Since it stood out to me so much at the time with it’s iMac looks, the Handspring Visor Deluxe—their second device—seemed like a great starting point.

Palm OS devices are incredibly well served by the fantastic PalmDB and most everything I talk about below comes from there originally—I encourage you to check it out.

Hardware

8MB RAM
Freescale DragonBall MC68328 CPU

Software

Operating System

My Handspring Visor comes with Palm OS 3.1H2 and can seemingly be upgraded to Palm OS 3.1H3.

Software Update

Utilities

HackMaster
ScreenShot Hack by LinkeSOFT

I’ve been using ScreenShot Hack (along with HackMaster) to capture all the screenshots on this page. It works well, but was a little fiddly to set up.

Games

Palmdale
SFCave
Zork I (and Frobnitz)

Frobnitz is a minimal Infocom (Z-Machine) interpreter for Palm OS. It seems a little curious playing a text based adventure on a Palm but Frobnitz offers quick directional shortcuts and Grafiti is fast enough for everything else.

Be aware that games aren’t automatically saved as you might expect on modern platforms like iOS and Android, so it’s important to manually save every now-and-then, especially before you Hot Sync to change batteries.

Synchronization

I’m using an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, so running the Palm Desktop software involves using emulation—I use UTM to emulate Windows XP. I was able to get the software into Windows by connecting to a Windows guest share using SAMBA on my Mac (thanks to a suggestion in this UTM GitHub Issue).

Palm Desktop (version 6.2.2 causes my Visor to crash, but Win-4.1.4E seems to work just fine)

Handspring Visor