Swyft-Inspired?

Last weekend I tried a few times to use both SwyftCard and Canon Cat emulators and in both cases didn't have a lot of success. This could be attributed to my ignorance of the emulators involved, but it made me second-guess my assumption that emulation would be the "easy way" to get to a Swyft-like machine I could take on the road. But emulation isn't turning out to be the shortcut I expected it to…