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Dreadling Released
halxd2 writes: "Dreadling has finally been released. It's like Quake for Palm. The site says
Handspring is not working yet, but they promise to work on it. This
is really fun. The shareware version plays very well on my Palm III.
I think I'll be buying more batteries."
A bit too expensive too.
Palm has more number crunching power by far (I'm a gameboy developer...I know *exactly* how many cpu cycles you have to do something useful, and it ain't all that many).
Color gameboy displays are better than the palm, refresh wise, and they have color (limited, lame ass, backward compatible color, but color nonetheless).
Gameboys are designed to be cheap: 1 chip for everything, a SRAM chip, lcd, some resistors and transistors for an amp and joypad. Palms are not.
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
where a horde of monsters called 'users' keep trying to install defective and bloating software on your trusted production machines because they keep falling for the ads, and you have to quickly go around uninstalling them and scanning for virual trojan email attachments before it takes your whole business out. That'd be a cool game.
Wait, it's real! Arrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
you are stupid.
DON'T!! connect the batteries without a load on them!! They will overheat, causing damage to the battery and possibly your house if a fire results. A better idea would be to get a battery holder, and a lightbulb socket with wire terminals. Radio shack sells a nice one. Alternately, you could use a resistor of a couple kohms (dunno what the ideal discharge rate is.. 1V / 1kohm be about 1mA, kinda low).
Kudos..
..don't panic
On another note, my greatest problem with games on the Palm are the controls. The palm's buttons (especially the IIIc, where there's more room) should be, from left to right, a direction pad, a wheel and a set of four buttons. Kinda like (+ | %).
It's nice to see people scrambling over a black and white game running on a processor that was being taped out twenty years ago. The "GeForce kicks Voodoos a$$" nonsense and driver compatibility crap gets really tiring after a while. Now if we'd only see something original, instead of clones of the same old games, then we'd get some life back into the game biz that once seemed so promising.
a 3fps (no joking) Wolf-3d clone
More like 6fps (played through Super Game Boy, recorded on VCR, and played back in proportional slow-mo. I counted physical screen refreshes per logical screen refresh). If you get a few speed powerups, the game becomes quite a bit more playable.
I should know; a while back (before I learned how to code my own wolfengine) I was thinking about making my own faceball clone: Faces Loaded.
Will I retire or break 10K?
For those looking for a download place that's not (yet) ./'ed:
Try Palmgear
It's a good thing that I don't like Quake-like games. That is why I'm not even going to download it.
That's right, I'm not. (Damn, slashdotted already..) Now, I am not going to sit here and wait for the moment the /. effect wears out. Really. Then I'm not going to install it on my Palm and play for two straight days. I did not get these rechargable batteries so I wouldn't have to worry about the costs of hardcore gaming. Really, I didn't..
Productivity Disruption Accelerator
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Hello,
I can confirm that this works fine on my Visor Delux. Very nice. Indeed, small and fast.
You can download it off Palm Gear
PS: Would be nice if the author included a mini-icon (I use launcher3)
--
Why? Because after about a year or two, the batteries are no longer made by the manufacturer. They rechargers are often specific to each kind of battery, forcing you to buy *another* charger and set of batteries. If you bought enough rechargable batteries to last for 10 years, then they would pay for themselves. I'm all for saving energy, but if it comes down to $20 worth of batteries for a year vs $75 for charger/batteries/spare batteries per year that you'll wind up throwing out anyway, I'll stick with the $20 batteries. As it is, my palm lasts for 30+ days (about 24H runtime) off two AAA batteries.
The closest I got to good batteries was the Millenium that was around in '93 or so. But they're not being made anymore, and I have two chargers gathering dust in the basement.
If you're going to get a battery-power whatzit, make sure it has the batteries (and charger) built into it. Palm V, cell phones, laptop, UPS, digital cameras, Minidisc, etc all have batteries built in that can be recharged easily and last for a while.
-Mark
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Sure. There's already a Tiger Woods Golf cartridge for it. I'm sure others will pop up soon if they haven't already. I have a Visor. I'd like to have a game or two for it to pass the time when I'm stuck someplace boring.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
True, you make a lot of good boys (gb cheap, durable, better display (in some ways)).
Sure the palm costs more than the gb, but if people already have them, why not? The concept works well for PC owns, why buy a psx when you already have a computer (even though it is for boring stuff like work) sitting on your desk with more cpu?
Durable, yea, this would really be bad in the little kids market, wonder how they do in "I am a grown up and take care of my stuff, but still am immature and play video games" (I would fall into this category)
Grey scale lousy refresh lcd has got to suck (haven't even looked at the palm, so I will take your word on it (after all it was said on slashdot so it has to be true))
But for the 20-26 year old "kids", most of us could justifice buying a palm "Yea, it is for business purposes only, uh huh it will be used for purely proffesinal reasons only" then we turn around and load quake, final fanasty and zelda on it as we walk away and say "sucker"
If my freinds walked in on me with my pants down and a game boy in my hands, they would get a little freaked out. but sitting naked with a palm is understandable, because it looks more like an adult computer than a kids game machine.
Uh Riiiigggght, I think that is a bad example...
Ok, in a business meeting, you can either take your palm or gb, which would it be? Ok that is a better example, but after the meeting, on your lunch break, who should care if you get some head counts in quake?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
If games above the level of solitaire becomes common, the handhelds will get caught in the same "upgrade every year, forget compatibility" spiral as the PC.
It will be all fun and games, but I'll miss the days, when you simply pressed the green button and made a note, instead of waiting for a reboot (checking sound card... done, checking 3D accellerator,... )
All opinions are my own - until criticized
As if I don't waste enough time on my palm throughout the day.. 20 or so Websites on Avantgo, Solotaire, and now this..
I'm gonna have to go back to pencil & paper..
air and light and time and space
all we need at the tilt and motion sensors and make it a real 3D experience
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Okay, my boss has official declared that I am not getting a palm after seeing this! Arghh!!!!!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
The blast of the shotgun won't be the same without my subwoofer. However, if I aim my Palm III in the right direction and use the infrared beam, maybe I can get some satisfaction when another player's Palm explodes...
Palm-frag-o-rama-fest
WebWord.com
Usability, information architecture, and all that stuff
How to Download YouTube Videos
I for one am dead set against this kind of thing appearing on this sort of machine. The Palm Pilot and other machines of its type are meant as tools for increasing our productivity, not for wasting time gaming. The time that we do not spend glorying God and all of His works is time that we should be spending working, not "playing", an activity which encourages sin and leads to damnation.
People that pervert Godly tools like this into machines which allow Satan to corrupt us through the unclean ethics inherent in "games" are themselves tools of the Devil, and we should rid ourselves of them at any cost in order to save the fabric of our society from the ravening hordes of darkness which threaten to overwhelm it.
Dreadling is an interesting maze demo and the 3D effect isn't half bad, but I can't imagine playing it for any length of time without getting a massive headache.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
IIRC, the Palm can only establish an IR link with one other device at a time. So it would be two players at most.
-JD
Your boss reads Slashdot?! Lucky bastard.
Ditto. I had too much fun playing Breakout in matrix algebra classes. It's a wonder I didn't fail I played so much.
Unfortunately I lost all my games a couple of months ago somehow. Couldn't have been a battery change, since I went through two or three of those no problem. Oh well.
The Palm has a com port on the bottom, which has a proprietary connector. This usually connects to a cradle or a hot-sync cable, which has a normal 9-pin connection at the other end. This may be plugged into your PC, notebook, cell phone, or other device. You can do TCP/IP through this COM port and make the palm a real host on your network fairly easily. Having said all that, I have no idea if this game supports multiplayer, or if it supports the com port.
Yeah, but Visor's suck for gameboy-type games because they don't have the cross-pad type button setup. That makes most games all but unplayable. There will be some that will work ok, but it might not be worth the effort.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You know the stock market crash everyone has been hyping about, it is coming, and this is going to be a big part of it. Think about, all the tech stocks are over rated, now we call all these people in the tech market playing quake say "Yea, I will get right on it, first though I must FRAG some people in my address book, I mean call some people in my address book about venture captial... yea that's the ticket"
Seriously though, quake on the palm, this is cool and all, but seriously do you have a Quake tic-tac-toe game in your paper address book?
If I had a palm though, I would be so totally on this man.
It would be cool to fit the palm into the Game Boy market, it is small, portable and can do a lot more than the gb, just wondering which one has the most cpu crunching power, palm? How are the displays on the palms?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
You might be able to play Quake in wireframe or something. Or ditch the texture-mapping and just have solid coloured walls. Combine that with some simpler-looking weaponry and opponents (a big rectangular blob would be just as fearsome-looking :-) and you might get something Quake-like running at a reasonable frame rate.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I test software for Visor Insider. I loaded dreadling up this morning on my Visor Deluxe and haven't had any trouble.
admittedly I've only played for a few minutes, but it works.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
I'm definitely looking forward to this one - but I'll wait for multi-user capability first before I buy it. Virtually all my geek friends have Palms, and we could probably have quite the I/R fragfest with these puppies.
From what little I can see, it looks kind of like a cross between Daleks, Wolfenstein 3D, and the old Mac classic Maze Wars. Cool little app for a Palm.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Game Boy is based on a Z80 CPU clocked at just over 1.0 MHz. The graphics in FaceBall were like Wolf3d without the texture mapping.
But then, Wolf3d on a 3.5 MHz 65C816-based SNES was impressive too.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In general, I've had problems with just about every PalmOS game that uses the buttons as an interface. They're just way too slow. If you compare the tactile response on a GameBoy pad versus the Pilot, you'll notice that you can get a lot better reaction times on the GB. Also, the layout of the buttons on the Pilot is truly dreadful for gaming; I can't even really play tetris.
What would be a welcome piece of hardware for people who are really serious about this would be a gamepad that plugs into the serial port. But at that point, you may as well just get a GameBoy.
Causation can cause correlation
An alternative download place: PalmGear (the site in the aticle is slashdotted.)
This game might be great, but I'm wary of anything that tries to make the Palm OS a gaming platform. I can see the bickering beginning already over Dragonball vs ARM and color versus monochrome. In my mind, computing speeds advance only for scientific and gaming needs.
Gaming on the Palm will demand faster, more intensive resources (not to mention batteries) until the bloody thinng forgets it's supposed to be a neat little replacement for pen, note pad, address book, and all the other things we keep in our cargo pants.
The only productivity device I have left is about to start chipping into my productivity. Help!
bugger.net | MunkAndPhyber.com
OK, OK, so I know I'm setting myself to lose some karma, get marked as a troll, etc...
But seriously, It's not Quake. It's not even DOOM. It's Wolf3d. Orthogonal 8-foot-thick walls, no height differences... It's the engine used on a 286 back in the day. Granted, it could be countless fun, but even that's a problem.
I'm on my second warranty-covered Palm V, and I just had a repeat of my old problem. The app buttons come loose far too easily. Play too much of this, or Reptoids, or any other shooter for the Palm, and your Palm V is almost guaranteed to get a button (or two) loosened up.
And forgive me for sounding a tad jaded, but wasn't this also shown off on the TI-85 calculator as the Daedalus engine? Nearly acceptable framerates there, too, and that's a Z80 at around 6MHz or so, and only 32K of RAM.
Lots of fun to be had, but it's a little overhyped, and well... it's been done. Now, when that OpenGL setup for the Palm can handle a true Quake clone, I'll be all over that. This is just proving that a Palm can do something that it's had the horsepower for since greyscale was first hacked.
Just my $0.02. Moderate at will.
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."