Dmitry Grinberg Brings Palm OS 5 to the Fisher-Price Pixter Family

Developer and vintage palmtop enthusiast Dmitry Grinberg has announced a new target for his rePalm Palm OS porting project, and this time it's something from the turn of the century: the Fisher-Price Pixter range of kids' toys.

"Fisher-Price (owned by Mattel) produced some toys in the early 2000 under the Pixter brand. They were touchscreen-based drawing toys, with cartridge-based extra games one could plug in," Grinberg explains. "Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids' toys go, in USA in the early 2000s. A friend brought it to my attention a year ago as a potential rePalm target. The screen resolution was right and looking inside a 'Pixter Color' showed an Arm SoC [System-on-Chip] — a Sharp LH75411. The device had sound (games made noises), and touch panel was resistive. In theory — a viable rePalm target indeed."

Grinberg's rePalm project has been running for a number of years now having brought the classic Palm OS, first launched in 1996 on Palm's popular personal digital assistant family, to a variety of unlikely platforms — including Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller as found on the Raspberry Pi Pico development board, despite a mere 264kB of on-chip RAM. His latest work, though, reaches back in time to the early 2000s to turn a family of electronic toys into fully-functional palmtops.

Fisher-Price's Pixters were kid-friendly portables with, in their initial incarnations, limited 80×80 black-and-white LCD panels — no good for Palm OS, which was originally designed for the Palm Pilot 1000 with a 160×160 display. Later models, though, upgraded to higher-resolution color displays — as did Palm's PDAs — making them, in theory, capable of running Palm OS.

In order to get Palm OS running on the Pixter Color, Grinberg had to expand its 128kB of internal RAM — while the later Pixter Multimedia's generous 4MB was enough as-is. The Arm chip was, in theory, a match, but initial porting efforts were stymied by what Grinberg describes as "the worst Arm SoC I've seen yet," with a minimal ARM7 implementation lacking cache, memory management, and memory protection. Buttons below the display were repurposed to bring up on-screen Graffiti text input, and the internal speaker linked to a simple buzzer function — the Pixter Color's CPU lacking the performance for sampled audio playback.

"I did some benchmarks and found that Pixter Multimedia performs approximately on par with Palm Tungsten T. Pixer Color … looks cute trying, but the benchmark results are comical — it is 6% as fast as a T|T," Grinberg admits. "But for basic PIM [Personal Information Management] and many games this is plenty. Warfare Inc works! What more could you ask for?"

The work is detailed in full, along with OS image downloads, on Grinberg's website.