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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."
Don't read this!
"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...
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.
"Another way to go blind!"
RTFA, they're porting games, not pr0n.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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
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?
A novel idea (not really), but what I want is PDA-type apps for my GameBoy Advance.
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
Its build for gaming and has plenty of "old school" titles, including many Sega games.
I've owned various Palms throughout the years and while they have uses, they are pretty crappy game platforms for the type of games that Sega is talking about -- fine for Solitare or Minesweeper type games, I guess... Its not even a very good Tetris machine because the controls were obviously not laid out with gaming in mind...
Buying a Palm just for games is...rather silly, IMO, where there are far superior dedicated systems for that purpose.
well, borkov successfully crashed my visor prism.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Believe it or not, I don't think games on PDAs would actually compete with the GBA. The reason is that these games are likely an attempt to get more people to buy the PDA's themselves.
I'm willing to bet that most people made their choice to buy a PC over a MAC (like 10 years ago...) because the PC had a ton more games. This may sound silly to a non-game-player, but consider walking into CompUSA, finding that PC has shelf after shelf after shelf of software, and then going into the corner where the Mac stuff is. Even if you don't play games, the psychology of this may come into play.
The GBA will always be a better game machine than any PDA. It's dedicated to games and it shows. However, the PDA gaming market would likely do just fine for those of us who have one but aren't sure what to do with it besides keep phone #'s.
In other words, the two markets likely touching borders.
"Derp de derp."
If you are in the market for a controller for your palm check here
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. >;-)