The Greatest Greyscale LCD Ever Made 

Great vid! Ex-Palm employee and creator of Deity 3D engine here; @14:13 The Deity engine and (also used in Master Thief 3D) was really approaching the best that could be done with the CPU power and memory at hand (written in 100% 68K assembly). Full-blown DooM was/is not going to happen on the DragonBall series (we used a lot of tricks to get close-ish, such as "fake" floor/ceiling/water texture mapping). That said, we did re-create the entire E1M1 level in Deity, which looked fairly close to the real thing. Back then the DooM source, nor assets were free for use, so sadly, it remained for internal use only. Fun fact; Deity3D started its life on a Palm V (my first PalmOS device). Fun times! 😃

Mate, i don't have anything interesting to say or smart to comment about in particular regarding this video, just that i think your channel is awesome and i always learn something every time you upload. Cheers Janus Cycle.

Despite how limited they were, there's a part of me that feels deeply nostalgic for these old PalmOS devices.

❤The old technology is better than now ... Simplicity ... Effectiveness ... No ads ... No visual pollution ... Thank you ... Wait every day to watch your content... Truly your channel is a treasure ...With all the love

4:38 Judging by the small opening in that component, I would argue this to be a piezo buzzer.

They look so modern and yet so dated at the same time

When I was a kid I had a similar device with a barcode scanner built in. They were thrown out at my dads workplace. I absolutely loved the thing, took it everywere to play games and scan every barcode I could find. Way cooler than a gameboy because it has a laser! :D

Sony really made some of the nicest, most feature-packed PalmOS devices every. The last one I carried was a TH55, but I also owned an SL10 and later bought an NX70 for collecting purposes. The best actual Palm-made device was, in my opinion, the IIIC. I played Bejewelled so much on that, I wore grooves in the display. I really hope some day, PDA's make a comeback. I'd love to see what companies can do with modern tech.

Did the music get too loud at any point in this video? If yes some timestamps will help. I've been working at improving audio and your feedback on any aspects of the sound quality in this video is greatly appreciated . Thank you.

If you can find it, Kinoma player will play audio over the integrated speaker. They have to be encoded by Kinoma on PC... but audio on a piezo speaker blew me away in high school

wow your voice is making my anxious mind getting calmer 🏝 thanx for 16 minutes of chill

Sony Clies were so cool and desirable when I was a teenager. I wanted one so much.

Sony's 230x230 grayscale screen is really something to behold in real life. It looks much better than the numbers would suggest to modern sensibilities. Obviously it also looked amazing back in the day when you were used to 160x160 but since the SJ/SL Clies I've scarcely seen any other monochrome LCD match it. If you have ever seen a Handera 330 in real life this seems downright HD by comparison. And the Handera had a somewhat standard 320x240 mono screen and I think was the first such Palm device with a virtual silkscreen. Very nice device that, as well as the TRG Pro that came before it. Sony ofc was the next to do 'Hi-Res' screens, I have an NR70 and it also was a Palm OS 4 device but with a 320x480 full color screen, very cool~ I also appreciated some of the small QoL updates Sony did with their Palm devices, like including a backup to memory stick right in Applications and the ability to make the icons small, it was almost like a very lite launcher. The jog wheel was also a nice touch but Sony was putting that on everything in the Y2Ks. Some of the problems that arose from pre-OS5 Hi-Res screens was that some programs wrote directly to the Palm LCD instead of using normal APIs so compatibility was a problem, rare but it happened. That is also why plenty of old applications crash on the emulator I think. I've encountered some that don't play well on OS 5 hardware. That 128x2 Memorystick you have there is neat, I have a translucent purple one. And that manufacturer 'Hagiwara' made other Clie accessories. They even made a Wifi memory Stick. Also, you can technically force the CPU to directly make more sound come out of the buzzer than just beeps. Do you know how super early DOS games only had the pc speaker? Well there were ways to make regular sounds with those, i think the same principle applied to this. That it is possible but you use so much CPU that it isn't worth it for games all the time. I have an old proof of concept PRC that I downloaded a long time ago. There was also a Amiga MOD tracker that worked with the old OS4 Palms called PsyTexx. Worth a look. Also also, if you want to be blown away, check out some of the PocketPCs from ~2005. They had full VGA resolution screens! 640x480 in 2005 was out of this world. I posses an example, a Dell Axim x50v. It is really something else (even if the viewing angles are horrid, IPS these were not, Lol)

I like Janus Style. Always a joy to watch those high quality videos with lots of details including tech stuff.

I had the Clie SJ-22 as a kid. I think it was this version with color. It was amazing. I remember watching the demo video on it for the first time, blew me away.

I believe the "power related chip " at 4:38 is actually the beeper, as both of its pins seems to be coupled by the 2caps below and there is a tuned hole on the plastic top to resonance air in a specific frequency.

I love that every new tech in the 90's felt like a miracle, even simple gadgets, and not just because i was young back then. The leap in technology was huge in the 90's compared to the 80's that was also similar. Now basically everything is more or less the same like we had 15-20 yrs ago. Sure better resolution, faster processing and all that and VR is obviously great now, but i'm not that excited anymore, we take that stuff for granted now and people are even getting tired of the tech, especially when it comes to social media platforms. It's just not fun anymore, more like an addiction. Too much of the good makes it bad

I had one of the Palm Pilot IIIc models, cost me 500$ back in the days, but oh boy was it worth it, I literally used it till the buttons physically withered away and fell off. The display of the IIIc rivals ANY displays ever made for these, it had only 256 Colors but was an TFT display which was a really big deal back then. Having only 256 colors also gave it an edge of crystal clarity and also crazy sharp black-levels, which means it literally looked like an Oled display. Playing Galaxian on it was like the Arcade original and it looked absolutely gorgeous. You could view it from all angles, and it was so gobsmackingly beautiful to look at.

I used to have a clié sj22 (I think) as my first sony pda. I bought the headphone adapter immediately and had a pretty cool digital music player akin to my old handspring pda's. Good times!😊

Always informative, entertaining, unpretentious... keep doing what you're doing

Sir, I am quite pleased by the quality of this video and the interesting calm narrative. You put effort into this, thank you!

Awesome video! Brings back great memories of making Palm OS do stuff that modern cell phones can do but years before the iPhone existed! I have a Sony Clié too but mine has a color screen. My favorite Palm ever will always be the Tapewave Zodiac!

I legitimately had to restart the video because it sounded like you said "My favorite pound of ice." Excellent video by the way! I used to own a Palm Tungsten E that I put TCPMP on. The good old days. :)

Never knew this Clié has a greyscale screen because of the high resolution. Interesting and gorgeous screen indeeed.

I use a CLIÉ SL10 (same form factor, but no white backlight) to play a Japanese card game (Hanafuda Koi-Koi) which only works on monochrome devices. It's on PalmDB.

Just another awesome production! You make any type of ancient technology look like futuristic and somehow you pay a tribute to all the great people's hard work that made today's tech possible. Just love it 👍

Janus, mediaQ was used only in sony clies for 4.1, like N and NR series. NX and NZ uses neomagic chip for acceleration

So excited for you to get to the Clie UX50!

Sony devices in the 90s and early 2000s had this futuristic tech wonderland feel. They made these tiny machines brimming with ports and neat features. This minimalist Apple future that we have now really sucks. Even with the slab phone design there is a lot of room for variety that no one takes advantage of. I'd love more ports or how about one of those side toggle switches!? They would be great for scrolling websites and reading ebooks.

Awesome vídeo as usual

I remember this one, it was a gorgeous little device

That fujitsu IC is a video and audio decoder with an integrated 32bit RISC CPU, fast transfer and manipulation of image and sound data, and a many other related functionalities. It was released in the mid to late 90s.

This is my favorite channel, explains everything in great detail. I always look forward to your videos. Follower from Vietnam 🥰🥰🥰🥰

Check out the Psion 5 and hp lx 300 series. The higher end models have some insane contrast ratio :)

Would be kinda cool if you could get your hands on a Xperia Pureness. I'd love to see it from your perspective..

15:59 Neelix being the third wheel? What a way to close out this video.

If it's really the case that it doesn't have any special hardware to help with the graphics then it's really impressive that they managed to render four times the pixels without a significant impact on performance, they were basically stretching the hardware and software as far as it could go. And that's a really nice looking screen, back in the days of monochrome LCDs it was rare to see a device with a backlight display that looked that nice, even if the ghosting is a bit too noticeable for modern sensibilities.

MB86Lxxx looks like RF Transceiver Family of Fujitsu, MB87L is close enough. It maybe RF related. Edit: MB87L2250 is "MPEG2 Transport, Video and Audio Decoder with integrated 32-Bit RISC CPU" from 1998. It can be related to that. MB87L2070 is a "QAM Demodulator" from 1999

thank u for such a comfy video. I'll be waiting for the next videos with impatiens

Great video. I was a big user of Palm devices back in the day, especially the Sony CLIÉ devices. I started with a used Palm V, before moving on to a few different CLIÉs, but eventually settled on the NX70V for several years, until I left PalmOS for BlackBerry. Re: your comment that the SJ20 seemed to be a low-end product, just as a general guide: The S/SL/SJ series was the entry level, T/TJ/TG/TH were the "workhorse" midrange devices, and the N/NR/NX/NZ were the high-end. The UX were the oddballs, more targeted towards being style-concious (although most of the CLIÉs blurred that line a bit, especially the NX and NZ). The VZ leaned entirely into the style/entertainment/consumer category as a halo product that tried (and failed) to redifine the PalmOS market.

Have several Palms and Clie including the color ones. Enjoyed the Sony ones much more. I remember spending MUCH time with these devices. Having from an HP41 and TI86 background. 🙂

I had a Clie SJ-20 when I was a kid! I saved up my allowance forever so I could have some kind of portable computer, since I had to travel 4 hours between my parents every 2 weeks.

Welcome to the Palm, Palm-machines, Palm-a-like, Palm Beach channel!

these were great . i remember the quality.

It's impressive that Sony pushed the DragonBall Palm OS beyond it's limits.

What a great video!

i used to have a sony peg-ux50, regretted selling it. love that thing, and its so expensive now

13:25 Now I'm curious how well a black-and-white Popeye cartoon plays on here

I think the Fujitsu MB87L4631 is some sort of custom version of video/audio decoder chip with build in RISC cpu. Like the MB87L2250, where u find datasheets online.

Thanks

04:35 That's the speaker!

I still have one...the flip cover has basically disintegrated but it otherwise still works. Good GameBoy emulation device.

This is an amazing channel. Thank you so much for your work. God bless…

I have a PEG-SL10. That's a cheaper model, but according to reviews from back then it has the same LCD, only with a worse backlight behind it. It also takes AAAs instead of having an internal lithium battery, which I consider a benefit since you don't have to worry about the factory battery having died in the past 20 years. All in all they're both good devices and among the best of the classic 68000 Palms.

4:35 I think that's a type of surface mount piezo buzzer

Sony is always making unique technological innovations .. 😮

The unknown fujitsu chip might be a fpga of sort which implements the dpi conversion functionality.

And people complain about iPhone with 800x1700 pixels being "low" resolution. Sure, it's like 16 years newer than this one, but our eyes aren't getting any better.

"Memory Sticks were popular at the time" is a sentence that Sony always desperately wanted to be true.

Why the Palm Vx? The m500 is a significantly better device in every possible way. For what it's worth, the Handera 330 also has a 320x320 pixel grayscale display. The EL backlight on Palms wears out and gets dim with time. It was not always so dim, and the m500 has an improved backlight as well. You should try Secret of the Orb Gold Edition, its one of the best monochrome Palm games, and it does a lot of programming tricks for performance. The Handera 330 deals with it perfectly fine, but despite collecting Palm devices, I always avoided the Sony devices as much as possible. I'd be curious to know if it works properly.

I just found a Palm TX on eBay for pretty cheap, along with a new battery. I didn't know they were on eBay until watching this video and deciding to find out what the last true Palm PDAs were, and well, one fell in my shopping basket 😅 I have a broken T5 and M100 in a display cabinet, but I think having a working one could be cool. I had a IIIx at university, then later a Tapwave Zodiac.

I really miss PDA devices, hoping to get one ordered soon.

I had a CLIE PEG SL10-E, the battery you installed may fry it at some point, if above ~3.3V, as that's what happened with mine. On a 3.0V discharged battery, it powered on, used it for a few hours, had to charge it, of course it was 3.6V, it blew up.

PalmOS 5 games review would be awesome

In modern time I want to buy it again

This was a good one. I'm gonna break out my Tungsten TX and play with it!

Instant subscribe, love me some retro devices. 🤖

Hi, the large component with the dot is the speaker, I have come across LCD modules with MediaQ chips on the LCD module itself so maybe it something that is true here as well

Dulu perangkat ini di indonesia khusus bagi para pengguna kantoran atau bisnis,tapi saya beruntung bisa menikmati perangkat seperti palm os ini.

Every single Clie I've seen online has been absurdly priced lmao

I had the clie peg-nx70v. It was a great NES and SNES emulator. Also, gamer. You could use the keyboard to play games.

I'm 99% sure there's no GPU or "hardware assistance". They simply rewrote the standard graphics functions to work with doubled pixels (and the text routines to use the high-res fonts regardless, just at pixel-doubled *positions*). A 33MHz 68000 had enough power to deal with that. There were some apps that were incompatible with the OS4 Cliés, and those were presumably the ones that did stuff with the LCD controller or framebuffer directly, bypassing the OS routines. Those would have had their 160x160 assumptions broken.

I'm still in my 20s, but I miss those days of diverse tech that constantly gave people unique experiences, it was so much more fun compared to the same boring mass-produced Android/iOS devices we have now every year. It's ironic that no one talked about "diversity" back then, but there was more of it in every part of our lives.

Love the outro mate!

The video playback on these devices feels like the original VideoNow.

This is so cool...

I have a palm iiic that I had to replace the worn out backlight using bits and pieces from both my original and a parts unit. Next up on my repair list is the broken power button and the worn out battery. I also need to locate my stylus that fell somewhere on the floor days ago.

Hey 09:19 is Star Trek Voyager with Nelix, Belanna, and I thikn Tom Paris??? FELLOW VOYAGER FAN HERE!!!!!!!

Wah perangkat nostalgia,,, dulu saya pengguna palm os.. Dengan kartu inject alias kartu CDMA di tanam..

That reminds me of e-ink,, before e-ink. I used to have that Clie....£20 at a carboot sale; dead battery :)

Clie is god tier. If you were next gen cool, you had a Clie.

1:48 unbelievable but truth is, sony doing the same thing in their flagship Android 4k display phones .

4:22 is that a still working Yotaphone 2?! Mine died a while ago and i miss it dearly, I'm jealous

Clie devices were so posh. Frankly I really like Sony's design language of that era. Also that 'power device' is the speaker/beeper. Hm, come to think of it - never bothered taking apart my SJ22, boy the screen on that thing was tack sharp after original palm.

16 minutes since posting lets gooo

Pretty much everything, yeah.

Hi from R. of Moldova, i like prod Made in Japan.

could we get a video about motorla rarz v3-v3i? I got one, that was my childhood phone ugh I was dying to get one as a child, and I just want to explore it's full capabilities before the 2g network shut downs here. please I guess you are the only channel do these type of things on this platform.

I'd be very interested to see what you do with these devices as EDC. what software do you use o get the most out of these? do you use them for the original uses, contacts and calendars, or is there some newer software that let you do more modern things?

Where did you find the ending song? I see you have it in the description but I cant seem to find that specific version anywhere!

I have the very first Clié and the SJ33. It amused me how they focused on multimedia, the first one came with the Godzilla trailer. My SJ33 having audio became my MP3 player which I used until smartphone came out.

PLEASE review a NOKIA N GAGE or N GAGE QD I think it's safe to say it's the world's first gaming phone

What is that epaper/eink device at the 04:22 mark?

most pda's had a simple framebuffer chip

i tried a palm OS emulator once it was fun

This was very forward thinking, if you had this back in 1999 or 2000, then you were the king😁

ive been working a project of my own its basically shoving a shitty HP laptop into the shell of a commodore 64 shell and id say its actually working out pretty damm well as i have ALOT of space to work with

Dulu maupun sekarang banyak pemuda yang tidak tahu perangkat seperti ini.

I want a Sony CLIÉ

懐かしい。今はスマホしかないけど、ＰＤＡが流行していたときは楽しかった。