The Greatest Greyscale LCD Ever Made

Sony's CLIÉ PEG-SJ20 is regarded as having the best greyscale LCD of all time. Taking a deep dive into how Sony adapted Palm OS 4.1 to handle the high resolution of these beautiful displays.
While also doing a comparison to my favourite Palm model of all time, the Palm Vx. The jewel of handheld computers.

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Music in this video:
暗号零 - 半圈
Dreamstate Logic - Etheric Echoes
Dreamstate Logic - Synchronicity
LeDju - A Photograph of You (words and music: M. L. Gore)

[thisislilraskal]

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.

[Longlius]

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

[neoqueto]

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

[dilucide]

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

[JanusCycle]

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.

[bjornkeizers]

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.

[patriotbarrow]

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

[WolfmanDude]

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

[woovebox]

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! 😃

[Rebelnightwolfe]

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. :)

[paralelmind]

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

[Sb]

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)

[johnduty]

❤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

[kzhvkok]

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

[subliminalvibes]

I'm kinda speechless! I had no idea (especially at the time) that PDAs packed such a punch.
Cheers Janus! 👍😎

[JTManuel]

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!😊

[jsn_ex]

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

[gluttonousmaximus]

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

[deliternity]

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

[joonglegamer]

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.