From the title, you are going to think of me as a massive noob, well, it is my first post... anyway, I'm starting to learn programming and stuff and not sure if this can be done etc.
Anyway, to the point, could we create something that you run on your computer, while running an app on your n810, connect the usb and basically, use the processing power of the computer to help in emulating these things... possibly even use your n810 as a controller for an emulator of things to display on your computer-not as important and I realise that it can already be done...
So, could we get the n810 to hijack the processing of my computer or not????

(PS: I realise that developing the emulator is hard... I know some ipodlovers who could get me in touch with the creators of jailbreak... giving us the os of the itouch... etc. but that's not the point of the post)

Why or why not?

Okay, I have to say, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve here... so you want to be able to test out touch interfaces that you're building for other devices by using the touch screen of the NIT but running the application itself on another computer? Or?... I mean the easiest thing to do would be to run the emulator/whatever on the machine with a VNC server setup, and just use the NIT's VNC client to interact with it... it would happen over the network and the VNC performance on the NIT is not uber spectacular, but it would do what I think you're after... otherwise, I don't understand what on earth you're trying to do...

first off, welcome to itT, melon.

a few things:
1. on emulating the itouch: the processor in the ipod touch is very similar to that of the tablets--same architecture (ARM), almost same speed, though i think the 2nd gen ipod touch is 532MHz, compared to 400MHz n8x0. so, if the itouch is "high processor", then so are the tablets. (i anticipate a few curious posts wondering why anyone would want to emulate an itouch with an n810, but i'll avoid that question for now.) but, yes, in order to emulate the itouch with your n810, you'd need a much more powerful processor, like that of a computer.
2. the easiest way to use a computer processor to do work for the tablet is to just make the computer do the work and display select elements on the n810's screen and also allow input from the n810 to control the computer. this can be accomplished via the internet with vnc (win/mac/linux) or remote desktop (winxp). vncviewer is available here and probably in the 'extras' repo, and rdesktop is here and should be in 'extras' as well.

so... first, you must get an emulator working on a computer. the rest is a piece of cake. anywhere you have internet access, you'd be able to emulate an ipod touch. it still won't be as fast as the ipod touch, though--even if the emulator runs fast on the computer--because of the lag from remotely accessing your computer. oh, and you'd have to leave your computer on all day so it would be accessible to your tablet.

oh, and it's illegal, but you probably already knew that.

hmmm.... technically, its illegal but not to create it just to use it (sigh: the law can be used to your advantage in so many ways and im not surprised if a law case over a murder would soon state that it was the gun's fault for having an oversensitive trigger) well, actually, it would be legal if you pay for the apps etc. (provided U didn't use the actual OS and built your own) but enough of the legality.

So, your saying that we could have the emulator running on the computer and then display all the stuff on the n810... (that's what I meant by the way... so sorry for the confusing post) hmmm... what about using a USB for less lag... but that's beside the point. My idea is that we partly use the processing of the n810 for immediate reactions (to reduce lag) and then that stuff gets sent to the computer in the background... then the computer processes more stuff and gives the n810 the broken down, simpler edition that just involves what would be necessary immediately. I'm not sure if this would completely work though. In other words, you press the button, the n810 knows what to immediately do for the next say, 2 seconds while it sends the data to the computer, is processed and is sent back to the n810 so the n810 can then determine what to do in the next say 2 seconds, it wouldn't work for apps taking up all of the processing power of the itouch but, most might still work with little lag. Hopefully, this would reduce lag but, it wouldn't be enough to play high processed games...

How should we get started?

Emulation is definitely not the best thing to learn programming with

Yeah, even though I didn't know what the sounds meant at the time, I can remember my dad sayin' as he watched me try to roll on to my tummy, "hey kid, maybe you should learn to crawl before you build that fusion reactor."

I know this guy who built his first fusion reactor before he could crawl. Crawling just didn't seem important to him until after he had his doctorate.

that's very interesting. got my mind cranking pretty good there for a while. i'm not sure if you realized the connection or not, but that's basically how a considerable portion of the internet works, if i'm understanding you correctly. when google maps calculate routes, for instance, all of the processing is done on the server, in contrast to flash applets (like fullscreen-stopwatch), which can be downloaded and subsequently run without an internet connection. the result--returning to the google maps example--is a delay, and i'm pretty sure that can't be avoided.

EXCEPT in the case of OnLive, which is supposedly very responsive. but they have a really cutting-edge protocol, so i'm gonna join the crowd and say that it would be very difficult for a beginning programmer to implement something like this with the tablet and with decent responsiveness. but it would be awesome if you could prove us wrong.

you could work on a menu/navigation/launcher system with kinetic scrolling and try to mimic the appearance/style of the itouch gui instead. you could use bits and pieces of open source apps/projects people have contributed here, like liqbase and personal launcher. anyway, i'm not a programmer, so maybe i shouldn't even be posting here....

Well, I think just about everyone wears a diaper to their thesis defense.

But okay, forgetting "hello world" for a second. How did we go from:

to:
Those guys over at Google are smart; I blame them for this.

You will need to create an emulation layer which makes the iPod touch software think it is running on an iPod touch much like the Hackintosh community did with PC hardware. How difficult this will be, I don't know, but I know the iPod touch (and iPhone) use approx same ARM processor as N8x0. If you're a beginning programmer this is probably not easy to achieve. Start with little hacks instead. Pick an existing project and enhance that. Be it for jailbroken iPod touch OS or Maemo, your choice.