Tapwave Closes its Doors

ewhac writes "Tapwave, makers of the universally acclaimed Zodiac mobile gaming device/media player/PalmOS PDA formally announced on their Web site that, 'the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005.' The Zodiac was a PalmOS 5.2 device with gaming and media features, including ATI graphics and Yamaha sound acceleration, proportional joystick, two SD slots, Bluetooth, 200MHz ARM CPU (Freescale i.MX1), and up to 128M of RAM. At the most recent Palm developer conference, Tapwave employees were showing Zodiacs running their own port of Linux 2.6.10, with ports of SDL, Python, PyGame, mpg123, and primitive power management. It is unknown what will become of this work."

Comments

Meh. IMHO DRM helped kill this

[kaitou]

I had(have) one. Wonderful little device in almost every way. Solid design, good screen (a bit washed out colors, but still), plenty speed for a PalmOS.
The only problem was the DRM.

See, software that took advantage of the special hardware accelerator/screen API/system functions in the Zodiac had to have been cleared and approved by Tapwave, they'd turn on the "Not Evil" bit and you could run it. Otherwise, it'd reset your device.
They blocked access to parts of the OS, so no third party language addons would work (no russian, no japanese in my case).
Since all programs had to pass by them, they got to pick what they would allow people to run. I remember a big stink when they wouldn't authorize a GBA emulator, because Nintendo had threatened the company that wrote it (not Tapwave) originaly. That certanly hurt them, and I have seen developers stay away from the Zodiac for worry about whether their program would be allowed to run on it. (This is once again, only for programs that changed the OS, or used the zodiac special features, hardware accelerated graphics, and so on)

Furthermore all software that was authorized to run, could only run on your one zodiac. It'd reset otherwise. I had a hell of a time with that when having to replace my Zodiac for another one.

In the end it had great hardware, so-so software, and a draconian enough DRM to annoy most users, and a fair amount of developers. Really sad to see it go, but I have been expecting this.

Re:Meh. IMHO DRM helped kill this

[ardiri]

The only problem was the DRM.

i resent that comment.

as one of the designers of the DRM - it was developed with the developer in mind, and most importantly protecting the content that was published on the platform. as a developer in the handheld space; i've looked at a number of DRM systems - and, the system we contributed with helping tapwave with was secure. it still hasn't been broken, and it shares uncanny resemblances to the new Sony PSP DRM (someone copied). even i had software signed.

See, software that took advantage of the special hardware accelerator/screen API/system functions in the Zodiac had to have been cleared and approved by Tapwave

the tapwave was capable of running *all* palmos applications without digital signing. it was only the applications that used the specific zodiac hardware that actually required digital signing.

Furthermore all software that was authorized to run, could only run on your one zodiac. It'd reset otherwise. I had a hell of a time with that when having to replace my Zodiac for another one.

the DRM was tailored to support universal signing for all devices - just take a look at some of the games we wrote. you could download a demo which was using the zodiac hardware API's and it would run on *every* zodiac out there. if you wanted the full version, you had to get a version signed to your device.

the problem is not the DRM - but, what the developers chose to do with the DRM. most developers refused to look into the alternative options that the DRM provided; and, did the simple "hey, you need to be signed against your device id - sucker". there was options in the DRM to allow signing against a user account - which, in the event a user changed their tapwave device, they just need to update their profile on their handheld to ensure that their user account was still valid.

- software signed against user-account
- user-account signed against device

when the user changed device; they could get a new user-account signed - and, the existing application would continue to run. now - my point is that this was *all* in the design of the system. the DRM was also designed for SD card distribution - which, you could take a single SD card between multiple devices. the people you heard bitch about the DRM should have purchased card versions of the software maybe?

to what extent tapwave made the full design of the DRM available, i dont know - it been a long time since i checked. if you have any questions regarding the DRM - dont hesitate to fire me an email. the tapwave was a great device - that failed due to a lack of marketing and branding. it wasn't the DRM.