Zen of Palm (2003) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Zen of Palm (2003) [pdf]

cs.uml.edu

54 pointspavlov10 comments

In my youth, the closest thing I ever had to a gaming console was a Palm. There was a plethora of quirky, indie, and experimental games for Palm OS, here are some of the best I can remember:

- All games by Naoki Ito. This Japanese genius made simple arcade-style games, always with short levels of increasing difficulty, all of them perfectly balanced and extremely addictive.

- Space Trader. On the other end of the spectrum, a slow-paced trading and fighting game set in a generative world.

- Sigma. A weird little game with dice and a bell-shaped cumulative bar graph, unusual but once you got the hang of it, it was impossible to put down. I sort of recommend installing a Palm OS simulator/emulator just to try this one out.

Edit: Alright, here's some more:

- Car. A bare-bones version of GTA I. The best part was that the level editor came with the (free) game and ran right there on your Palm.

- Space War. A turn-based strategy game where you move your (Star Trek inspired) ship on a hexagonal grid, and try to predict what your opponent will do during that turn.

- Aldon's Crossing. A fairly classical top-down RPG. It seemed like a tiny game, but the more you played, the more you realized that the world was surprisingly huge.

And, of course, tons of remakes of ultra-classic games. Note that I only played a small portion of the palm-game-o-sphere, and I was limited to those that would run on my low-end grayscale Visor.

Please do go on! I remember Space Trader quite fondly. The intimacy of games for this platform is something I don't quite find in today's marketplace.

It was pretty fun re-playing Space Trader in Classic on an HP TouchPad.

And now I'm searching for that Windows port: http://ticc.uvt.nl/~pspronck/spacetrader/STFrames.html .

As a kid, I once made my own (terrible) version of Space Trader on a TI-83-plus. That game was cool. (Oh, and I'd cheat by exiting the game to save before a battle or anything random, then turning off the palm if it didn't go my way.) Brings back memories ...

As for games, bike or die was major.

I was particularly fond of the onboard programming environments for PalmOS. For example, cbaspad: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palm.html

Most of the links on that page are broken, but you can download the interpreter from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/tucows_34107_cbasPad

It's a wonderful classic BASIC that even supports goodies like peek(), poke and call(), access to the serial port, graphics, pen input and more.

There were also C compilers (OnboardC), Forth implementations (Quartus Forth), a Scheme (LispMe) - all enabled by the robust text input capabilities of the device.

edit: There's an interesting paper about the making of LispMe: http://3e8.org/pub/LispMe.pdf

> A proposal to add a menu bar that’s always visible should be vetoed reflexively, because the handheld screen is too small.

Practical wisdom from 12 years ago. I have been annoyed by every website that uses a horizontal bar. It takes up at least 1/5 of my phone's screen!

Or any other screen. And balloons in size if their third party JS font code don't load...

This brings back fond memories of Palm OS development. It wasn't the easiest platform to develop for, but as this document describes, user experience was emphasized and the thrill of making sophisticated tasks simple using constrained resources was satisfying.

Funny that his topic would pop up. Years ago I posted to the PalmAddicts web site on this very topic. I see it is still there at http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/09/return-to-...

You might enjoy reading it. I had almost forgot about it.

PalmOS did a lot of things right. One thing I'd like to see make its way to mobiles again (or iOS at least), is better handling of "app data". PalmOS made it a point to separate the executable and it's data, in the form of a database file that could be easily backed up.

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