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Game-development on Compaq iPaq
kilaasi writes "Some hard-core game-developers from Finland is making super-optimized games for the iPaq and similar devices, tweaking and tuning every bit of piece there is. These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."
This has been fixed in the 3800 series. You can push multiple buttons at once now.
It is about time that programmers realize that embedded systems are not desktops. Hard drives are not an option with these things.
More attention needs to be placed not only on making smaller programs perform better, but getting the program to perform closer to the hardware specs. This is what programming used to do with Assembler.
He co-designed the 3DO and Atari Lynx, plus was an OS guy for the Amiga (note that he did not design the Amiga hardware; that was Jay Miner). And now he's the lead tech guy at Fathammer.
Of course in this case it is debatable whether the best games for a system such as the iPaq should be hardcore 3D. If you take that route, then 98% of the processor time immediately goes out the window.
I'm curious to know why this is such a lost art. Could it be due to the fact that most engines are proprietary code?
If you want to find out how to write optimized software rasterizers, you can easily get the information from books and the web. This is old news. Everyone was into this back in 1995 and 1996, and in the end there was one generally accepted, close to optimal inner loop that was used in most texture mappers. It was published in Game Developer magazine and is available for free on the web.
From the article: These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull.
For their time, nothing comes close to Commodore computers, the C64 sold 22 million units between 1981 and 1987. I started out with a C128 (I rarely ran C128 programs, instead I almost always ran it in C64 mode) and migrated to the Amiga's in 1989. I started out with an Amiga 500 and moved up to the A1200. Those machines were way ahead of their time, they were multimedia machines before the phrase was coined.
They had 4 channel digital stereo sound, could display 4096 colors out of a palette of 16 million onscreen at 1 time (this was when 16 color EGA was the rage on PC Clones). They had a fully multitasking operating system, and it was completely GUI orientated. They were also plug and play too, but they called it auto-detecting the hardware. I own a PC now, but at the time I'm glad I was an Amiga user instead of a PC user, I never had to go through all the troubles PC users were plagued with at the time (remember setting jumpers for ALL your hardware, and praying there were no conflicts?).
Shh.
Future Crew is still kicking ass, yes! :)
I was the group organizer in Future Crew during 1989-1994. My nick was GORE. In addition to me, three of the original FC members are working for Fathammer. The others are either working at my previous company (Remedy Entertainment, maker of Max Payne), Bitboys (www.bitboys.fi) or at some other Finnish high-tech company (e.g. F-Secure or SSH).
Check out this review. Actual model in hand, retail purchased. Buttons fixed as well as screen dust bunnies addressed.
Here's a download of the demo:
http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=985&page=3
It's pretty cool!
I was at Eidos headquarters about two months ago and they showed me Tomb Raider on iPaq. I was blown away. (And trust me, I've seen/played a lot of video games.) The quality (FPS, etc.) was better than the original PSX.
t ml
As someone already commented, the controls were... interesting... but nothing that you couldn't get used to after a little bit of practice.
Anyway, for anyone who cares, here is a link I saw about iPAQ TR:
http://www.pocketgamer.org/archives/00000314.sh
--- My dad's political betting