PalmOS Lemmings | Hacker News Reader

PalmOS Lemmings

github.com

159 pointsmemalign36 comments

Hi, I literally found an old SD card with files last modified from 2005 with a few palm games from then, would anyone find these useful for reverse engineering?

Dump them somewhere... the Internet Archive maybe? A lot of Palm stuff is bit rotting. We need it saved.

Check https://palmdb.net and if anything you have isn't already accounted for, submit copies.

Please submit to the internet archive.

Odd coincidence, I downloaded Amiga vision on my pc last night, first thing I loaded up was lemmings.

https://amiga.vision/

It is basically a curates set of Amiga games, or as the creators say "consolised" Amiga. I'd originally set it up on my mister fpga and it is as close to zero setup on that as possible. Pc version was easy too.

0mhz is a sister project for dos: https://0mhz.net/

Anyway, not exactly related to this, but just a personal coincidence.

thanks I wasn't aware of the superstationᵒⁿᵉ

Yeah Aaron is a PalmOS legend.

I really liked the palmos c libs, MemCopy and WinCopyBitmap just reads so much nicer than memcpy and memset. Also UInt8 and UInt16:)

Those were fun times, when 16bit ints were enough for everyone (just kiding;)

This is awesome, I wish I had it for my Treo.

I love and miss PalmOS. My current iPhone I can’t wait to get rid of it. It’s half owned by other companies, phoning home in the background all the time, addictive. My Palm devices really felt like mine.

There was also a version of Lemmings on the HP48 calculator: <https://www.hpcalc.org/details/530> (incidentally by the same author as Alpha Waves, a.k.a. Continuum)

This README is begging for historical context and commentary.

I can't help but agree with you

I never quite got into Lemmings (Worms was more my thing) but I love these pieces of software for limited hardware of the day such as Palm, Windows CE, or Newton.

Edit// Oh this guys profile is full of cool Palm OS stuff.

Aaron was/is quite the coder. I used to belong to a group he was in as well. Learned a lot. Also took it as a challenge to crack his palm programs :) and he learned techniques to thwart us lol.

Fun guy.

He sounds great! I love these characters that you find in programming. My niche is more Mac Os System 7 -OS 9 and Be OS but the same sort of people exist in those realms too.

Hey there helf! I remember you from the #palmchat era. I went by irq back then too

Interestingly he removed some of his clones (Mario brothers and others) on the request of Nintendo. Maybe his clones were too close to the real thing.

Looks like at least one survived: https://github.com/ardiri/palmos-maryobros

Thankfully lemmings is much safer to port and have fun with, and is exceptionally thoroughly documented and preserved

It was not at the time: https://www.engadget.com/2010-07-02-unofficial-lemmings-for-...

Palm OS, not PalmOS.

Let's not forget nor confuse history.

And it is certainly never palmOS ;)

Pretty unappreciated game. To think that GTA of all games has its roots here

I also found a WASM version at https://www.hmilch.net/h/lemmings

Ah the wonders of memory handles and lock/unlock patterns.

Let me just get my Palm Pilot out so I can play...

does anyone else encounter github failing to load dark theme on first load, but working fine after page reload?

I loved my palm pilots so much!

I played Lemmings so much I may be porting it to Swift

Hold my beer...

I'm always interested in projects like this. But how do I know this is not AI code? Let me explain, I read a lot AI produced code at work, when chilling on nerdy things I really wish I could read just human crafted code, for pure learning and joy, but as time goes on I've seen myself questioning more and more stuff, code, videos, even books I go check the publication date

I agree but the commits look natural to me, even though it's a lot in a short time.

> Fast forward on the Memo key without a 5-way navigator Devices without a 5-way navigator (e.g. the m515) had no fast forward key, as To Do moves the cursor there. On these devices the Memo key now runs fast forward while it is held down; selecting a lemming stays with the stylus.

> Fast forward: the music keeps its pace The simple music engine of the devices before Palm OS 5 moved on one note step per step of the game logic, so with fast forward the music ran four times as fast too. It now moves on once per frame, in the event loop; the MIDI stream of Palm OS 5 has its own clock anyway

It's AI.

Where did you get that text? Seems like it's not up anymore or somebody push forced over that commit, although it appeared for a second in Google Search.

The latest refinement commits might be a bit more suspicious, bust most of it is a big commit of code from about 2001, when it was made open source.

From what I've seen, the guy that contributed some fixes some weeks ago, seems to write text that feels A LOT like written by an LLM [0], so maybe some LLM text filtered to the docs.

0: https://palm2000.com/articles/54

Those were two commit messages, from the guy you mention.

Seems like most of the code (what you find in the first commit) is 25 years old [0], from 2001, and then there are a bunch of commits with some fixes and updates.

  0: https://palm2000.com/articles/54

aaron also did the Deity3D engine for palmos that was a FPS doom-like. I think the engine was later used for Master Thief 3D which was an incredible game for PalmOS.

Interesting... for motorola palms or did it need an arm palm?

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