Einstein Newton Emulator on Android Oreo through 10

I recently brought my Newton MessagePad 120 back to life — for a brief window of time. It died again after less than 48 hours, but it was fun to play with while it lasted.

In lieu of finding more old hardware, I started playing with the Einstein Emulator. I’ve had it running on my Mac for awhile, but since the Newton was portable, it sure would be nice to have the emulator be in my pocket.

Unfortunately, Einstein hasn’t been updated in awhile and didn’t work on my Pixel 3a, nor would the source build in Android Studio on my Mac. A little hacking at it identified two issues:

  • The project had an undocumented dependency on a tool called ninja. Reported here, running this from the command line resolved: brew install ninja
  • Android notifications have changed since the project was created. I found how to update the notification, and implemented it as a work-around. I’m not sure its 100% backward compatible, so I’ve built and signed an APK of the original code and one with my updated code.

These updated bits, plus the necessary dependencies are assembled here.

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