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Game-development on Compaq iPaq

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the can-i-take-snes9x-on-the-road-yet dept.

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."

21 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Uhm... by Bob+McCown · · Score: 5, Funny
    These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."

    I keep telling my sweetie that, but she doesnt believe me.

  2. +external monitor === portable mame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    ::)

  3. Less is more by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :-)

  4. Yeah, but... what about the buttons? by cd_Csc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Yeah, but... what about the buttons? by SrlKlr · · Score: 3, Informative

      This has been fixed in the 3800 series. You can push multiple buttons at once now.

  5. nothing "small" about an iPaq by mj6798 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:nothing "small" about an iPaq by Score+Whore · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  6. Collapsing dimensions by igrek · · Score: 3, Funny

    The PCs are bulky. Those 3D games make sense on PC.

    But PDA are small and flat. The PDA games should be 2D.

    What we need now is 1D-game. If you know what I mean.

  7. Unreal? by death_denied · · Score: 3, Funny
    Fathammer founder Samuli Syvähuoko helped write Unreal, a 3-D demo that ran on old 386 PCs

    I wonder if the engine could be rigged to run something else by that name.

  8. Romero doing iPaq games by sprayNwipe · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm suprised that you didn't mention that John Romero and Co have moved to making games for the iPaq at MonkeyStone Games.

    Not only are they making games for them, but also trying to base a business on them.

  9. Future Crew, Demos, Elegant Code... by Blackwulf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. It's About Time.. by Scothoser · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  11. Ah, that's RJ Mical by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  12. In Flight Entertainment - Win CE vs. XBox Games by Embedded+Geek · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    --

    "Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."

  13. Re:Lost art? by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  14. Old Commodore Computers by headkase · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Old Commodore Computers by DGolden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

      --
      Choice of masters is not freedom.
  15. Re:C64 Demo Scene? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  16. Buttons and screen better... by mchang · · Score: 3, Informative

    Check out this review. Actual model in hand, retail purchased. Buttons fixed as well as screen dust bunnies addressed.

  17. A download of the demo by Sindre · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a download of the demo:

    http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=985&page=3

    It's pretty cool!

  18. Lara Croft on the iPAQ! by rcs1000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    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.sht ml

    --
    --- My dad's political betting