Slashdot Mirror
Old Games for PDAs?
Stin Tankin writes "I was looking for games for my PDA when I came across an empire clone for PDAs called Pocket War. I used to love empire. I also have Mame CE for my Pocket PC which provides a ton of old arcade games. These old games run great because they were made for slow low resolution devices. Does anyone know where I can find more of these old games? I'm really looking for something like Nethack for a Pocket PC or Sharp Zaurus."
With Microsoft's embedded toolkits relatively easy to get, I'd be surprised if such a game didn't exist.
But tools aren't the only thing holding back games on the palm-sized platforms. Lack of horsepower is also a fundamental problem of non-Pocket PC brand PDAs.
If there's a market for low-cpu/low-res games, then that explains why copyright holders of old games are protective of their assets. That colecovision ROM you think is worthless can still generate money. Don't compare to Quake IIVI, think ratio "entertainment/technical requirements"
This is rogue for the palm, and the controls are actually quite decent.
http://roguelike-palm.sourceforge.net/iRogue/
You can find it at:
http://trolls.troll.no/warwick/nethack/ipk/
And there is a quake port in the works.
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
I play old ZX Spectrum games in my Psion pda. ZX Spectrum was a Z80 game computer from the eighties that sparked many clones. Not that popular in the other side of Atlantic (cloned as Timex Sinclair), in Europe that machine was very popular. But emulators are available for Windows CE devices, and even Gameboy. Check http://www.worldofspectrum.org/emulators.html
/P edro
Someone mentioned iRogue; I'm a fan of that.
There's also NetHack 3.2 for CE. I dunno if that will work on PocketPC or not, not being a pocketpc guy, but I hope so.
What I'd really like is a palm nethack that will sync with my desktop nethack, but the devteam has made it clear a palmtop version is not in the cards.... (though these guys are working on it)
Good luck!
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Amiga is set to release a player for PocketPC in April. So far they already have a player for Linux and Windows. Eventually, they plan on having a platform where you can use the same apps on cell phones, set top boxes, PDAs, PCs, etc. A week ago on TechTV(Screensavers), Bill McEwen of Amiga demoed how you could play the exact same game binary on Linux, Windows, PocketPC, and WindowsCE. For more info check out Amiga-Anywhere or Amiga.com. To see the TechTV video clip, download the MPG from one of the mirrors listed here.
You can find it at http://www.mrousseau.org/programs/ti99sim/. Just think, you could be playing TI Invaders, Parsec and Munch Man in no time!
seriouslyexcited.net
Lemmings are out for Palm. Another classic I would kill for is Civilization. I tried it again after years of pause, and it is charming and is still very playable.
I have to make a plug here for my own Palm game, Jumpman Zero (based on Jumpman, a quality game from 1983).
Available here. Totally free. Source on request.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
There are a stack of emulators for PocketPC at least. You can get Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance (although it's not particularly usable on current systems), Megadrive, SNES, Game Gear, Master System emulators, as well as a stack of other platforms. The SNES and Megadrive ones aren't really that usable on current platforms, but they might be usable for slower games.
Scummvm has been ported - so that you can play old games from Zak McCracken (although I don't think Arisme's build currently has any support for it), up to Full Throttle, and soon Monkey Island 3.
I spend most of my time now playing games such as Dizzy on the Spectrum - there's a very nice emulator called PocketClive - which seems more than playable for old games such as these. For the Palm I haven't seen that much - I was hoping that somebody would write a Spectrum emulator (was even considering it when I had that elusive thing known as free time), but as of yet, it appears the PocketPC is where it's at.
Don't forget games such as Snails - which is a nice "new" game, based upon Worms and that sort of program. it's fun to play and quite cheap. Also the people are very pleasant.
There's lots of discussion of this sort of thing on PocketMatrix (www.pocketmatrix.com) and they have forums which are very well peopled. If you want to find other games to play, then PocketGamer (www.pocketgamer.org) is also very good.
I think that the interesting time is going to come when the new PDAs come out with the higher end ARMs - they should be capable of emulating everything up to the SNES at a decent framerate, although this might have an unfortunate effect on the original games market for PDAs. Still, we'll have to see.
This article is already at the top of the list on Google for a search on "zaurus mame." It's been only one day.
Google is fast!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Check out Void, which is a clone of the old BBC Micro (and others) classic space-trading/flight sim Elite.
Elite was a ground breaking game that elegantly used the limited resources of early home computers to brilliant effect, creating an immersive world in line vector graphics and text menus. This economy of resources has allowed to gain new life.
On the Palm, it feels like coming home. Mmmmmm...
All things in moderation; including moderation
a google-a-search for "nethack palm" returns quite some nice hits.
nicest: Nethack-Palm porting project