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Sega doing PalmOS Games
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."
Finally a reason to buy a PDA. I'll need a suitable controller, but personal address books and calanders just never quite made these things interesting for me. Serious old school gaming will get me to CompUSA for one of these faster than all the financial apps in the world.
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Jedimom.com, ph-balanced, for women.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Sega has demonstrated a number of games for Palm OS handhelds during a keynote address at the PalmSource Japan conference.
The games were developed specifically for the presentation using Metrowerk's Codewarrior and were run from a development board using a Motorola DragonBall MX1 processor. They featured colour animation and 3D texture mapping.
Sega announced in January 2001 that it would develop games for the Palm OS as part of a strategic move to exit the console business. It has already released a number of titles for J2ME mobile telephones. Sega was keen to stress the games, which included 'Smilebit', 'Borkov' and 'Triangle Magic', were not intended for commercial release, although they are available for trial download from http://pda.sega.co.jp/index-e.html which will stay open until the 30th of April 2002.
"When a new platform is born, developing and delivering a good quality software to the market is an important factor to drum up the business," said Shoji Ueda, President, Metrowerks Japan. "I think Sega's demo software has shown a possible path for developing game software for next generation Palm handhelds. In order to deliver a critical mass of software to the market, developers need a flexible development environment tailored to their needs. And it is our commitment to support and provide them with those tools."
"All your PalmOS are belong to us."
- I knew Sega was behind it all along.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Don't read this!
Sega is a PUBLISHER not merely a developer and aquires other programmers games and publishes them.
No big deal to "do" palmOS games.
They just publish 'em if they like them.
We can't compete with Microsoft & Sony... so let's port some TRS-80 software to a handheld.
I recomend every one check out the download site, the broken english is hillarious
"The highly efficient library which our company developed uniquely this time and which makes drawing expression rich is included in the demonstration software introduced by the conference. the company which can develop the application of rich game development or rich power of expression -- since offer is planned like, please contact me to the following mail address about a library and application."
And finally:
"In addition, a general user -- a question [ like ] -- please understand beforehand that I cannot reply to an inquiry."
Phew...
Another way to go blind!
Now, while I love my Handspring and think its both a great tool and a great time-waster, I have never found arcade style games on such a minute screen to be particularly compelling.
Honestly, even the best efforts in that genre -- and even with the new color, back-lit screens -- are just damn uncomfortable to try and see. After a long gaming session, I'd expect one's eyes to bleed.
There are exceptions, but there's always going to be the limitations of the straining human eye to overcome, and I don't think even Sega can do that with the restrictions that the current PDA architecture imposes.
This is what I've been dreading for ages -- a big player in the Palm Game cottage industry. The thing about Palm development is that it's nice and friendly, but it's not *too* capable.
As a result, some teenager in his garage can write the best software. It's like back in the eighties when ten-year-olds would be writing assembly code and games were *playable* rather than *pretty*. It's an area of the software industry that throwing money at the task won't help.
I've been writing a pretty large scale Palm game on my own for the past six months, and it's still a long way from completion. I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
Sorry about the unstructured rant, but I'm just annoyed now.
So, how long until NVIDIA or whoever releases a GeForce XYZ PDA Power Ultra v4 graphics cards to power the soon-to-be-announced QuakePDA 4? Sweet.. :p
Genesis Emulator? :))
:))
God damn you must be speaking about a Palm hardware that will ship in 10 years, maybe, because im part of a team that is developing an atari emulator and today Palms is damn slow do run it!
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
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
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
Hope they build a Quake clone to palm so we can all group and play it with our palms on a lan partie! :)))
damn, imagine you talking to a friend near you at a palm-lan partie: "hey, check it out, i modded my palm, it has transparent case, neon lights inside, geforce 4, and everthing else..."
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
What, me worry?
I can't imagine this being extremely profitable for sega. Although a lot of the new devices are built more like gaming controllers (I know the buttons on the latest HP jornada is similar to an oldschool NES controller), how many people would buy retail games to install on a handheld device when there's so many better alternatives for gaming.
If the games are priced the same way as console games I can't see many people buying them, and if they are cheap enough to raise the quantity demanded significantly enough, sega probably won't make much money on them anyway.
The page says the game requires "3.5 or more PalmOS(s)". I can get two instances of PalmOS running at once, *maybe* two and a half on a good day, but three and a half Palm OSs... man, that's more than I can do. They must have some really good engineers over there.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I Wonder when they will start making some games for Texas Instrument's line of calculators. If the TI-92 can do multivariable calculus, it should be able to play some really decent games. Doom anyone?
Sega's Swirl game is already released for PalmOS
Can the Palm (or other handheld PCs) become actual contenders in the portable gaming markets? I've noticed more and more people (John Romero, Tom Hall, SEGA) developing commercial games for the Palm or PocketPC. Good ones, I've heard. How big is the market for this sort of thing?
The only thing that concerns me is game control. Handhelds are not designed to be gaming-conducive. Heck, I hear some models won't let you press two buttons at once. But using the pen might make for some interesting games. I could easily see an RTS working like that. Or a Bezerk-like shooter where your character fires at the location your pen is pointing at, while you move him around with the directional pad. Lots of possibilities.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I particularly like Triangle Magic, which has turned my $400 Handspring Prism into a magical white screen.
Alas, no triangles have appeared yet after waiting 5 minutes.
:-(
"And like that
...but everyone's having fun with the Engrish translation, so I thought I'd share this one for a Kyocera Video Phone. Scroll down to the first sample "Answering machines with images".
By the way, neither of these games seem to work on my Handspring Visor Prism. Just a blank white screen that sits there forever and requires a reset. Anyone else having the same problem?
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Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
well, borkov successfully crashed my visor prism.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
If you are in the market for a controller for your palm check here
Sonic on PDAs. :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
[cough] Apparently, being an english speaker would not be sufficient. I love how many of the posts ragging on the "engrish" have spelling and/or grammar errors. [grin]
I was rather disappointed when I saw the screenshots of '3D Demos'. Nobody is going to want to play Mario 64 for very long on one of these devices.
I played a port of Quake on an iPaq once. It was kind of cute, but it didn't take too long for the gimmick to wear off. What was once 3D, while I was excited about it, turned into a puddle of pixels. For a screen that small, they really need some sort of filtering (bi-linear?) to make effective use of the screen realestate. Otherwise, it's just awful.
I am surprised at Sega for going down that road. One only needs to look at the strengths of these systems to realize the true gaming potential of them:
- Stylus Interface
- Ability to easily turn on and off without resetting the game
- The demographics of who owns these devices
- The IR Port
- Clarity of text on the screen
If I were a game company looking to make a game for a Palm Pilot, and considering these observations I made about the system, then my first choice for a game to develop would be a turn-based strategy game. Think about it, you could have a really long term game going (like MONTHS) and play it anywhere. You could play it for 20 minutes in your bed before going to sleep. You could play it in the can (during work hours!). You could play it while waiting for your bus. I hated CivII on my PC because it took so damn long, but I think I'd love a port of this game on my PocketPC because the system really lends itself to it.
As long as the game isn't terribly reflex based, this would be a perfect fit for this system and it's audience. Puzzle games are also quite perfect for this system as well. I've spent many hours playing reversi.
3D doesn't fit this system at all. I suppose if anybody could make it work, it'd be Sega. Boy would I be surprised, though.
"Derp de derp."
It had to be done :)
but what I want is PDA-type apps for my GameBoy Advance.
I once seriously considered developing such an app (using free tools available here), but I ran into two roadblocks:
A PDA needs a real-time clock that can wake the system from deep sleep to remind the user of an event. The GBA lacks both an internal clock and (to my knowledge) a reliable way for the cart to wake the system.
A PDA has a touch screen, useful for inputting text quickly through Graffiti or Fitaly systems. The GBA has an 8-way direction pad, four trigger buttons, and two tiny buttons next to the pad. How do we get text into the thing quickly?
Yes, there have been primitive organizers for Game Boy platforms (Workboy, InfoGenius, and Austin Powers), but I can't see how I would implement anything like the Palm environment. Anybody else have any ideas?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Palm V runs a Dragonball ZX (At least, I think it's the ZX) processor.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I don't own one of these calculators.
But this looks like a good selection
of games for your machine.
now, thats what I want ...
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
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. >;-)
It's called Pocket Pool...
And yes, it had at least one game I remember!! A simple lunar lander game, where the display alternately shows your height above the lunar surface and your velocity, and you have to make fuel burns at the appropriate time and of the correct duration in order to set the lander down gently on the moon's surface.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I just tried Borkov and TriMagic on my Prism and both freeze at an all white screen. I'm aware that Handspring tweaks PalmOS for their hardware.
Can anyone confirm these issues with a Handspring?
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Download a demo of Race Fever. Note the excellent graphics (admittedly not 3d like quake - Pole Position style) and smooth gameplay on color palm devices.
The real clincher is the control input - instead of futzing around with the buttons like too many games, they turn the graffiti area into an analog controller - the vertical axis controls speed (top of the area is max acceleration, bottom is brake), the horizontal controls steering.
When more game developers start finding control and gameplay models more suitable to the medium, I think 3d or quasi-3d games will become more popular.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I've only ever written one Palm app - Jumpman Zero (freeware if anyone wants to try it, source on request).
.mod-type music, but the best graphics and sound are still attainable by a hobbyist).
While big players could spell doom for the Palm game cottage industry, I don't think they will. On other platforms, Sega has an insurmountable advantage (compared to one-man outfits) - they have thousands of man hours. They have lots of hardware. They have dedicated artists and musicians. They have a budget. On Palm, they can't really leverage those strengths.
Music and graphics suck on the Palm, even if you're Sega. (And yes, I know some games have good graphics and some have even tried
Also, I don't think Sega's going to commit a lot of resources to a market where the sales are going to be slow (despite huge installed base), and where piracy is going to be utterly rampant (they can't really make a 30 meg game here - will they base a game on a springboard module?...).
So I think we'll see the Palm game market support a variety of players - and it won't be like the PC market where you there's a huge difference between commercial games and "hand made" ones.
At least for a while.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Assuming it's the same Bill Kendrick, he wrote the awesome game Gem Drop X, a Tetris-like game in which you line up similar objects to make them explode. It's one of those deceptively simple games that can be really adictive. Once you master the basic skills, you can get into a kind of zen state playing it for hours.