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

Uhm...

[Bob McCown]

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.

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. :-)

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.

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.

Romero doing iPaq games

[sprayNwipe]

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.

Old Commodore Computers

[headkase]

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?).

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.)