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

Yeah, but... what about the buttons?

[cd_Csc]

It's great that they're doing this - it will certainly allow for some cool games in the future, but not quite yet... the iPaq has a hardware "feature" that prevents programs from detecting simultaneous usage of more than one button. Nothing sucks more than having to stop moving so you can shoot or jump. To counter this, developers have built "virtual buttons" that appear on the touch screen, but this takes up alot of the already limited screen realty. Plues, its hard to get used to not having the underappreciated tactile feedback of physical buttons.

Future Crew, Demos, Elegant Code...

[Blackwulf]

Wow, the good ol' days. I was late, I didn't start getting around to the demoscene until Second Reality came out at Assembly'94. Then I was hooked. There were many hoaxes of "Third Reality" coming out at the next big demoparty, as I recall.

A lot of the old FC crew created a company called "Remedy" which creates the 3dmark benchmarks and recently released the game Max Payne. Purple Motion even did the music for part of 3dmark2001.

A few people on an IRC channel I used to frequent just found a 64k intro from The Party 2000. They said "wow, when did people do this?" When I started telling them about the good ol days of MS-DOS and the demos and intros (and 4k intros!) of that time, they all turned their noses and said "EWWW DOS was NEVER good for ANYTHING! Yuck!"

Of course, back then, the amount of polygons you could fit on a torus was the big challenge. It was what originally got me into programming. I feel so old now.

Of course now, it's so easy to create jaw dropping images without optimized code, so it's nice to see that there is something to really test your skills on like the iPaq. I miss seeing elegant code.

In Flight Entertainment - Win CE vs. XBox Games

[Embedded Geek]

I hope we see some good game development. I'm working on my employer's next generation in flight entertainment system and we need better games for the passengers to play. It's depressing that all the serious development of late has been for higher end systems - we're running a 266MHz embedded x86 at the seat under Win CE and there's little to choose from out there.

Although I'd like to rejoice at this news, I fear it won't help us much. With M$ pouring resources into XP and Xbox, I fear that CE (with its very reasonable liscencing terms) will become yet another orphaned child from Redmond.