With the multiplication of Symbian devices, more and more different configurations reach the market. As it is most of the time for an individual or a small company to test its software on all real devices, it is important to be able to simulate each particular device with as much accuracy as possible.

An important file for configuring the emulator is the epoc.ini file located in %EPOCROOT%\epoc32\data\.

We will see here how to configure the disk drives and the total RAM memory that the emulator uses.

Drives configuration

The emulator maps the Symbian platform file system onto the PC’s file system. Two drives: C: (the flash file system on NS60 devices) and Z: (the device ROM) are created by default.

The default location for these drives is:
C: = %EPOCROOT%\epoc32\wins\c
Z: = %EPOCROOT%\epoc32\data\z + %EPOCROOT%\epoc32\release\wins\udeb\z

This setting can be overriden and new drives can be added by editing the epoc.ini file. A line shall be added for each extra drive:

Here is my default setting to simulate a mobile with a MMC card :

Another interesting setting could be to redirect the MMC drive to the PC floppy disk. You will then be able to simulate the presence or not of the MMC without reconfiguring the emulator:

RAM Configuration

The epoc.ini file can also be used to define how much RAM memory our simulated device has. This is achieved by using the MegabytesOfFreeMemory keyword:

The default value in the NS60 SDK (1.x and 2.0) is 16. If the line is missing in the ini file, the emulator will run with its default 64MB value.