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Sega doing PalmOS Games

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the virtua-fighter-in-the-palm-of-my-hand? dept.

Bill Kendrick writes "Sega has demonstrated a number of games for Palm OS handhelds during a keynote address at the PalmSource Japan conference. PDA Live has the scoop. The games they've made so far aren't going to be released commercially, but they're available for trial download through April."

5 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Quick test by MarcoAtWork · · Score: 4, Informative

    Note: I have an oldish Palm iiic.

    The games load fairly slowly (10-15 seconds, maybe they're doing some precalculation or something) and you have to sit through slowly fading in/out Sega/Smilebit splash screens (come on, seeing it once should be enough!)

    Triangle looks cute, like some old MSX Konami game, but as soon as I selected (out of curiosity) 'quit game' from the menu, I got a 'fatal exception' and had to *hardware* reset -> game deinstalled.

    The other game seems definitely addictive, and it hasn't crashed yet, so I think I'm going to keep it for now: the rotation of the square is a bit choppy, but the user interface is really cool. Sucks that, unlike most palm games, if you switch to some other application and you re-enter the game, it just starts from scratch instead of remembering where you were.

    --
    -- the cake is a lie
  2. More Sega PalmOS by meknapp · · Score: 3, Informative
    Also, Sega has an official commercial relase on PalmOS - Sega Swirl. You can download the free "light" version, or the full version at the Sega Swirl website.

    Sega Swirl is an addictive puzzle game - originally a freebee for the Dreamcast, and later ported to the PC. The Palm version allows people to play head-to-head via IR link. Plus (unlike the demos mentioned it the article) it runs on monochrome Palms.

    --
    "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
  3. soft reset required... by edrugtrader · · Score: 3, Informative

    well, borkov successfully crashed my visor prism.

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    MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
  4. Suitable Controller by beerits · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you are in the market for a controller for your palm check here

  5. Hard to write fast portable PalmOS stuff by beej · · Score: 3, Informative
    Pretty much all the graphics routines built into PalmOS are slower than they need to be, and don't do basic things like blitting with transparency and so on.

    So people roll their own. The hardware is completely hackable, and it's fun. You can really get a speed improvement by doin' in your way. Unfortunately, many of the Palms use different video hardware, and things break.

    Are you using hardware pageflipping for your game on the IIIc? It's gonna crash the Handspring Prism, or worse! Basically you have to be very sure what you're doing is ok on a particular set of hardware.

    First, it's good to make syscalls to ID what kind of machine it is. If it's supported by your custom code, go to it. If it's not, you can do a few sanity checks. For instance, if I wanted to write directly to screen memory, I'd use the built in routines to set a pattern of pixels, and then my custom routines to read the pixels. If it reads out the correct values, it's probably good to go.

    In short, it translates to being a pain in the ass to do as-fast-as-possible graphics code across multiple Palm platforms. Far better to compromise and get some speed improvements that work on a broader base.

    Or, if all else fails, just release free betas to the general public. >;-)