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."

Comments

Less is more

[Brian Kendig]

It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.

If that same rule holds true for the iPaq, it might become one of the best gaming systems ever conceived. :-)

nothing "small" about an iPaq

[mj6798]

"Small is beautiful"? These people are programming a machine with a 200MHz RISC chip with 32Mbytes of memory. That isn't small, that's high-end desk-top performance of a few years ago.

Re:nothing "small" about an iPaq

[Score Whore]

Hmm. The original doom shareware zipped up to a single floppy. Unpacked to something in the area of 2 megs. The original Quake shareware was 5 megs on disk, 9 unpacked. Sure it get's expensive from there, but...

32 M/206 Mhz *is* a lot to work with. The Atari Lynx fer instance, has 64K (8 k of which has to go for a frame buffer.) And 4 Mhz. The original Gameboy wasn't any better equipped.

Re:Old Commodore Computers

[DGolden]

it was completely GUI orientated.

Well, v2.0+ also had system-wide ARexx scripting, a powerful shell, user-space filesystem drivers/translators so you could install a driver to let you cd into compressed files, the window system itself, etc. The entire GNU command-line toolset was also ported to it via a compatibility library called ixemul. The OS was built on a message-passing-by-reference system, which meant that IPC was zero-copy. There was also a very powerful networking add-on called Envoy that provided network-transparent messaging services.
It also had fun late-binding shared libraries, that could be patched dynamically at run-time on a per-function basis, allowing third party hacks to theme the GUI and tune the OS on the fly.

So, it had a kick-ass GUI, but it was good at lots of other stuff too. :-)

Where the OS fell down was its complete lack of true memory protection - at the time however, this had some advantage, since it meant the computers could be made with cheaper MMU-less CPUs, and meant that task-switching was extremely quick. Amiga applications tended to be naturally multi-threaded with non-modal GUIs, so fast task-switching was a definite plus.

Interestingly, there's a re-creation of AmigaOS for x86 available here. It's actually coming along very nicely, but has all of AmigaOS's weaknesses, as well as its strengths - e.g. no memory protection, but ultra-fast reboots for when you do crash :-) (a soft "reboot" actually just vectors back into the kernel entry point, skipping the BIOS and bring the back system up in seconds.)