It's oh so quiet... sh... sh

[hansschmucker]

Are there no intersting gaming news or whatever to post in here? Or is the Clié community getting old??? Has PocketPC2002 caught all our gamers?
Questions ... Questions ...

Fact is, that this has been the first time for me browsing the games forum and looking for news with nobody else around. This is depressing to say the least. I know the availability of a CF driver for Cliés and the like is terribly exciting... but please don't forget about your favourite Cliésource category, where innovation has it's place:
The GAMES forum!

Hans

[orol]

:o) i just browsed it too ..
and now i'm running allmost all my favourite games from computers i had ..
zxpilot (GREAT emulator!) and scummVM with indiana jones 3/4, monkey island 1/2 and simon the sorcerer 2 on my clie ..
the only thing i really want is a bigger MS for my sj30 .. but that's is suddenly not gonna happen since i have an 128mb ms .. maybe i should look into a MS select one :o)

[archangel]

I'm just wishing more game developers would take better advantage of OS 5. Most games support it, but are still written for the Dragonball processor. So far only Bejewelled and Shanghai have come out with separate OS 5 versions that I have found. Shanghai really takes advantage of the ARM processor and looks like a Pocket PC app.

[yOyOYoo]

Yes I also wish some better games that are ARM native would come out for OS5, i'm tired of seeing all my friends' ppcs have much better looking and more feature rich games than me!

[Mastermind]

The market is in a state of flux. Armlets, OS4-OS5, Tungsten this and NX that must really be making developers life a nightmare. Once their is a killer app that can drive sales of OS5 machines then we will start to see true innovation like Palm saw in the early days.

Lets face it most users other than people like see no real reason to upgrade when for years Palm has said you don't need color or audio or advanced features in a pda for years. I hope the Zire 71 did does for Palm what the iMac did foe apple.

[kdn102]

Also take into consideration just how long it has taken game developers to start making hi-res apps. Even with palm offering a hi-res device, the actual number of decent hi-res games has not gone up a whole lot.


But in general, since the first hi-res clie came out, it's been over 1 1/2 years. And now we're seeing about 50% or so of the software actually utilizing hi-res, not just supporting it.


So I would say don't hold your breath waiting for ARM native games!

[chrilith]

Just one thing to know :
there is no way to build 100% ARM native apps under PalmOS5, only ARMlets can be used.

[orol]

Originally posted by chrilith
Just one thing to know :
there is no way to build 100% ARM native apps under PalmOS5, only ARMlets can be used.

exactly, there were couple of threads regarding this and the bottom line was basically that palm os 5 is actually only palm os 4 recoded to arm instruction .. no big deal ..

[s_n_m]

Wow. Then OS5 will never be what it was hyped to be.

I hope OS6 truly is what palmsource said it would be.

[hansschmucker]

Wait, wait, wait. This is not exactly worong, but I think a couple more explanations are necessary:
OK, to build an application, you use libraries, which the OS supplies. For example, almost nobody uses a menu with a custom look on windows, since that would be quite time-consuming to make and would probably be slower.
Enter Palm. They also, have included something like the GDI window manager. It doesn't have to do everything a window manager has to do, since there's basically only one application at a time launched, but it's comparable. So, now we have a new system, which should have the look and feel of the old one. So Palm ports the libraries, which now ARE arm-native.

So, now we have a system where CPU intensive gfx and similar instructions are are ARM native. The instructions are called from unaccelerated code, but once they have been made a fast system takes over.

But what if an app has it's own set of cpu-intensive instructions? Enter the Armlets. They have only a limited way to communicate with the OS, but they can handle pure calculations fast. They get a few values, do the calculations and return the result, however they usually don't save or check keys or whatever.


Maybe an example will do:
You want to write an app for Linux or Windows. You write in Basic, which is really easy and offers functions for much stuff, you would never be able to code so effective. However, there's some stuff, which needs more optimization... so you code that part in C, compile it to a library and whenever you need these functions, you just link to your DLL.

That's about what you do in PalmOS 5, only the DLLs are called Armlets.
Hope you can make any sense of it.

[TheSpies]

You could make some really nice games for OS 5, the problem is developers want thier software to work on as many devices as possible. So they build it to work on 3.5 and up and just make sure it works on OS 5 as well instead of writing it specifically for 5.

The good news is that while PPC might be getting Warlords II, i hear someone is working on a Bejeweled clone for us Palm users! Joy! :rolleyes:

If were really lucky we might even get an updated version of Pong! Or a card game!

[s_n_m]

Or how about more crappy 160x160 black and white games that look like they came from the pilot???

I've yet to see a game with a real soundtrack, fully sampled sound, 320x320 or higher, and polygonal graphics.

Lets call the Spyro people, or, ask Sega for Sonic Adventure (the Dreamcast game).

[Mastermind]

Once you adding music lush graphics and the like you really eat up the memory of your machine. Then in that case you really might as well buy a PPC. What I would love to see on a clie is a really good series of emulators for the TurboGrafx, Nes, GameGear etc. Those old graphics would look beautiful on the small screens of a PDA.

[TheSpies]

I myself dont mind a large program: i have plenty of room on my stick and my flash card. The days of having to have small programs due to a limited amount of storage are over. How do you relate having a good game with nice graphics that is large in size to owning a PPC?

[Mastermind]

I have had several Palm Sized and Pocket PC's and what I love most about T415 is its simplicity and speed. I may not be able to run most of the new games but that all right for now. With my Casio and Ipaq they were great game machines. Well the Casio more so than the Ipaq but not so well for PIM and regular stuff.


Some of the best games I ever played were on the Super Nintendo, a 3mhz machine with custom graphics chips but still pretty primitive compared to new PDA's. However many of those games were no more than 2 megabytes. When developers are forced to work in a closed environment they start to get innovative. With this ARM race of sorts in processor speed develops will get lazy and bloat will creep in.

I am afraid that once developers start down the road of featuritis then the simplicity of the Palm will start to erode severely. Then we all might as well be using PPC. Hope that cleared things up.