Snilmerg™
Updated Wednesday, August 24, 2005 9:06 AM Boston time.
Snilmerg is a small Windows program for organizing Palm OS emulators and simulators. I wrote it because I use several different computers whose hard disks are filled with emulators and simulators, and I could never keep track of where they were located or which ROM files went with which emulator. Snilmerg's main features are:
- Automatically searches all mapped drives to locate Palm OS emulators and simulators.
- Automatically searches for ROM files stored near a given executable, so they're easy to find.
- Maintains a central database of named configurations that pairs emulators and simulators with their ROM files and settings.
- Launches any configuration when you double-click on its name in the configuration list.
- Generates Windows shortcut files so you can easily launch a configuration when Snilmerg is not running.
- Imports and Exports the PalmEmulators.xml file used by CodeWarrior for Palm OS, so that you can use the same configurations when debugging under CodeWarrior.
Snilmerg is only a couple of days old, so consider this a developer preview. There may be bugs. You should make a backup of your PalmEmulators.xml file for CodeWarrior before you overwrite it.
Please let me know what you think of Snilmerg and send along your ideas for how to improve it. I'm especially interested in ways that Snilmerg might integrate with PODS.
Snilmerg requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, which you can also get through Windows Update.
Since there is no documentation or online help, here are a few tips:
- If you use CodeWarrior for Palm OS, start by using File > Open CodeWarrior XML file... to open C:\Program Files\Metrowerks\CodeWarrior\Bin\Plugins\Support\Palm_OS\PalmEmulators.xml. This will give you a list of configurations to start with.
- The small plus and minus buttons at the bottom of the configuration list add (or duplicate) and delete configurations. Right now there is no confirmation dialog or undo, so be careful with the delete button!
- Although you can begin to use Snilmerg immediately, the drop-down menu of executables will be empty until the first search is complete. You may want to wait since this drop-down is very useful.
- Once you have selected an executable, the drop-down menu of ROM files will list ROM files in the same folder as the executable. If there are no ROM files in this folder, then Snilmerg will search for ROM files in the parent folder.
- When you create shortcuts for the first time, you'll probably want to create a new folder since the shortcuts will be placed directly in the selected folder.