Sega doing PalmOS Games 156
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."
Article Text (Score:2, Informative)
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."
Oh, great... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Damn them.. and yet, cool. (Score:2, Informative)
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!
Quick test (Score:4, Informative)
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.
More Sega PalmOS (Score:3, Informative)
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.
They don't work on Visor Prism (Score:1, Informative)
soft reset required... (Score:3, Informative)
Suitable Controller (Score:3, Informative)
How would one do text input on the GBA? (Score:2, Informative)
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 [gbadev.org]), 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?
Hard to write fast portable PalmOS stuff (Score:3, Informative)
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. >;-)