# About the EPOC Emulator

## Contents

- Overview
- Emulator highlights
- New features in EPOC Release 5

## Overview

The EPOC Emulator provides an implementation of EPOC which runs under Windows on a PC to provide a full EPOC target environment for developers. This implementation of EPOC is known as WINS — the single process Windows platform.

As well as implementing EPOC, the Emulator provides a generic emulation of an EPOC Release 5 device, complete with customisable screen sizes including large (800x600), VGA (640x480), and half-VGA (640x240) in colour or greyscale. By providing developers with a Windows hosted target and a powerful emulation of real devices, the Emulator enables most EPOC development to be substantially PC based. Only the final development stages focus on the target hardware. Of course, for low level programming where target hardware must be directly accessed, such as physical device driver programming, the Emulator is not a suitable development platform.

The Emulator is an essential component of all EPOC SDKs and supports development in a variety of languages, including C++, Java, and Symbian’s BASIC-like OPL language.

This documentation provides the information developers need to use and configure the Emulator. For language specific information about EPOC development using the Emulator, see the SDK for your language of choice.

Note that this documentation only discusses EPOC Release 5 features that are specific to the Emulator. General information, for example about using the standard application set, is not provided.

## Emulator highlights

Among its highlights the Emulator includes many small touches which enhance its usability:

- function key mappings to emulate hardware effects not available on the PC, such as low power
- special debug keys for EIKON GUI apps, see Debug facilities
- flexible reconfiguration of the mapping of the EPOC file system onto the PC, see Virtual drives

Other features which contribute to the completeness of the Emulator as a development target include:

- comprehensive configurability from initialisation scripts, for example to specify screen size and greyscale/colour depth, see About Emulator configuration
- full integration with the Windows run time enviroment providing support for comms, internet, and IrDA through the host PC, see Dial-up networking

## New features in EPOC Release 5

The EPOC Release 5 Emulator introduces some significant new features:

- full colour support, see Colour
- extra configuration settings available for the location of virtual drives and pointing device, see Drive emulation by configuration file setting , and Pointer type
- ability to run from any location: see Alternative Emulator location
- improved debugging support: when a thread is panicked, the debugger provides comprehensive information about the panic
- support for international PC keyboard variants
- any application can now be run from the \`system\apps` directory of an emulated `c:`, `d:`, or other non-`z:` drive. This corrects an error that meant, previously, some applications could only be run from `z:`\`system\apps`.
- an ER3 restriction that required the correct variant of the console DLL `econs.dll` to be manually selected has been removed
- the emulator executable is renamed from `wsexe.exe` to `epoc.exe`
- the configuration file is renamed from `system.ini` to `epoc.ini`