What about being able to launch the app as a (transparent) dragable window on the maemo desktop. that way it retains the same resolution. and doesn't look as bad as it does now with all that useless wasted space on each side.

Yes, there's lots of good games for PalmOS. There's the PC game ports like Doom/Doom 2 (and the mods), Duke3D, Heretic, Hexen, ShadowWarrior, Another World, etc. Also great emulators like ScummVM and ones for NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Sega Genesis, Sega Gamegear, TurboGrafix 16 (PC Engine), Colecovision, Atari, and AtariST. Then there's the games TonyHawk, EDGE (real-time RPG), Warefare Inc. (real-time strategy), VillageSim, Trivial Pursuit, Bike or Die (simulation), Arvale (adventure), Acedior (adventure), Madden '05, plus lots and lots of puzzle games like Bejeweled and Zuma and sports games like golf, mini-golf, bowling and so on and so on. And that's just off the top of my head.

There's a few audio apps I'd love to run, especially Microbe and Bhajis Loops:
http://www.chocopoolp.com/

Some games too.. unfortunately I've yet to get anything to actually run past their title screen, they usually just freeze or throw up an error

Actually the vast majority of new applications are _still_ m68k, and they will run on old as well as new Palm devices. The exception is specialised, resource-hungry applications like TomTom and the like.
In addition to being all-Palm compatible, m68k apps are very small compared to arm apps. And they run fast still, the PACE m68k-to-ARM just-in-time compiler in PalmOS 5 is very good. I'm only running m68k apps in the GVM so far, another poster reported problems with armlet applications anyway.

Thanks for the correction TA-t3 - I last used a Plam device (Tungsten T) in 2002 and tended to focus more on the multimedia functionality which as far as I can recall was ARM native (at the time it was a major selling point for software!) but I guess it's possible/likely that many of the more mundane apps would continue to be targeted at the m68K platform in order to ensure the widest degree of compatability.

As for the apps which ship with the GarnetVM (ie. date book, calendar etc.) I assume they're ARM native - it would seem odd for ACCESS to continue providing m68K applications!

That could well be the case, I also suspected this. They can presumably just recompile them and go, with possibly a few adjustments.

I also suspect that it's much easier to get the m68k applications to work with GVM (and maybe m68k applications are the _only_ 3party apps that are currently working, but the jury is out on this still) because m68k apps were always executed through the PACE emulator/just-in-time compiler in PalmOS5. Access would just have to modify PACE slightly so that it interfaces with the N800 Linux kernel system calls instead of the PalmOS kernel (there is actually a kernel down there in PalmOS 5, licensed from some company). Native ARM code, on the other hand, would be more tricky because compiled 3party ARM code would be geared against the PalmOS kernel and some complex intercepting would have to be done in order to get it to work correctly with the Linux kernel. Think getting Wine to work with native Windows applications on Linux, if you like. Same CPU, different operating system interface. Tricky.

I'm doing a lot of guesswork in the above, as of course I don't know what Access has actually been doing with the GVM. But this is my gut feeling as a developer.

Anyway, we'll learn more when we've all done a bit more testing..

Is anyone else having memory leak problems? (I am running OS2007 on an N800)

I am able to start up the VM and launch applications just fine, but when I quit out of the VM, my memory (128MB virtual enabled) is pegged at 100% and does not return to normal until I restart.

Can't say that I've noticed it in the way you have, maybe because I don't use extended virtual memory. But yesterday when I was trying out a whole bunch of applications it happened that launching apps would fail, I restarted GVM and it worked again. Could well be memory leak issues.

I just found out about portrait mode (turn off full-screen in the GVM settings, as described by thoughtfix), and then you get access to the rest of Hildon directly (without having to go through the home button). Here's a screenshot.

EDIT: Funny thing: load-applet-run is invisible in the screenshot..? (I used it to make the screenshot. It's supposed to be in the dark area between the wi-fi symbol and the battery)

Slow or not slow, this is the ONLY thing I know that ported my 20 years of contacts seamlessly into the tablet without a hassle. A slow or not slow Garnet VM got the job done. Hands down. Now I can really put my Dell winCE to ebay.

bun

I don’t know if this is really a reflection of the VM speed, but I ran the palm benchmark app Speedy v6.4 from aldweb.com on both my Treo650 and my N800 (OS2007) and got the following results:

Treo: Calc Test=0.53, Mem Test=0.24, Graph Test=0.33 Total 1.10sec (~273MHz)
N800: Calc Test=0.73, Mem Test=0.09, Graph Test=0.82 Total 1.64sec (~183MHz)

From these results it looks like memory access on the VM is far faster than the Treo but calculation and graphics are a little slower. It would be cool if someone could run some comparison tests on an n800 running OS 2008 and on a 770. Again, I don’t know that these numbers mean anything, I have tried some of my favorite palm apps and they seem to run great in the VM. Like many of you I would really like to see a full-screen option but that aside I think this is an awesome app.