Old Hardware Emulated :POSE Emulating The Palm Pilot (Part 5)

 

Games Galore!

Sim City For The Palm Pilot
You're on the Amtrak, US Interstate, or airline. You're the backseat driver counting the seconds til you get to your destination. Your mind starts drifting towards pointless distractions to help pass the time. One could be tempted to getting hypnotized by the road. One might have a GameBoy with them for that long journey. However, they might have the add-on battery pack attached to the back of it as well (those GameBoy's liked to kill batteries). Other's might have one those LCD Tiger Electronic games that are better left in the past because those pretend Gamboy's were beyond crap. I don't miss them.

With the falling prices of the Palm Pilot, such devices proliferated into many places where they quickly became the norm. It only made sense for software developers to write programs so users could populate their Palms with them. The platform was flooded with various applications programs. But why should application software get all the attention though? Can we have a little fun on the side too? Fun that can actually be more rewarding since again, that Palm didn't massacre batteries like the GameBoy or that pretend GameBoy that should be tossed out the window into digital purgatory (the ditch by the side of the road).

Game developers quickly embraced the Palm. Being in the business of game design allowed such developers to eventually push the hardware to its limits. Most of what populated the Palm were ports of arcade classics that actually translated well into the handheld platform, providing those time-killers that were so badly needed. Clones of popular arcade classics like Space Invaders, Frogger, Lode Runner, Pac Man, and Breakout found new life on the Palm. But why stop at arcade conversions though?

One could make simple, but yet, involving games that are variations of other time killers that we've played in real life. One could have the option to play the handheld versions of Tic-Tac-Toe, Chinese Checkers or Chess. Why should Solitaire just be confined to a 52 card deck or it's digital equivalent on Windows that was draining millions of hours of productivity in the corporate environment? What about BattleShip? Rapidly embraced by users and like those arcade conversions, these games translated well onto the new platform as well.

More Palm conversions of popular video games.

The success of the Palm Pilot by the masses caused the platform to be evaluated by major games studios as well. EA published a Palm port of Tiger Woods PGA Golf onto the handheld. Before 3D demos made their mark on the Palm, PGA Golf was visually impressive for it's day. Maxis released a version of Sim City for the Palm as well. The well-known city building game would provide many hours of fun for those that wanted to manage their virtual urban centers on the go. That port was updated with color graphics when the first Palm that supported color, the IIIc, was released in early 2000.

While still not the most impressive game graphically for that platform, (their will be a part two article of Palm gaming which will explore 3D demos that really pushed the Palm hardware to its limits) V-Rally is a good example of what developers could do when pushing their hardware even more.


One could be content with being Tiger Woods, a ball slamming bricks coming down in a row, or a frog avoiding traffic. One could also engage in street Capitalism in the form of Dope Wars. One takes on the role of a unlicensed pharmacist selling his wares throughout New York City. This title has been a staple of gaming since its first release as Drug Wars for MS-DOS on the IBM PC in 1984. The source code of the Palm version of Dope Wars was modified with the player being a Wall-Street insider in the form of Abritage. Abritage still fits the theme as insider traders and runaway capitalist manipulating the stock market for a quick buck are sorta like drug-dealers in their own way.

In time, developers started to delve deeper into the hardware and in the process, pushing the graphics capabilities of the Palm even farther. Compared to the 8 and 16-bit handheld platforms, the Palm Pilot had a CMOS variant of the 32-bit Morotola 68k rocking at 32MHz. These handhelds were much more powerful and capable than their predecessors. 

Developers new to a unfamiliar platform will stay in the safety zone as defined by the SDK. As such, the early Palm games were very standard in what they did. As time went by, developers become more familiar and conformable with the platform. Go outside those SDK guidelines, they started to write games that accessed the hardware directly, permitting the development of games that were much more visually impressive than imagined.

The developers really didn't have a lot with considering the given hardware constraints. That's why later in it's life, it was very impressive and mind-blowing what these developers could pull off with those restrictive constraints. The Palm had a  low-powered processor, small amount of RAM, and a screen with a small resolution and low gray-scale color depth. Working within those restraints forced developers to find clever ways of milking every ounce of performance out of their Palms.

Games like Tiger Woods PGA Golf, Sim City, and V-Rally showed that the Palm could be much more than just a appointment keeper and niffy organizer. While many might be dismissive of these technological footnotes, these games showed that the Palm could be a legitimate gaming platform with its users taking their games on the go. The results are nothing short of impressive.

V-Rally For Palm
POSE
Like the Palm applications, games came in the PRC executable format that would normally be installed onto a real device with the Palm Desktop application that ran on both Windows and MacOS and synced to  the handheld via a Hotsync while in the cradle. These PRC files could easily be installed onto the emulator. In general, like with application software, their was good compatibility with gaming software.

However, the Palm wasn't the most stable of platforms. Stability was compromised even more when developers went outside the guidelines established in the SDK and started to access the hardware directly. By accessing the CPU, screen, and other hardware directly, their was a much greater chance of system crashes. As such, a badly misbehaving application could still cause the Palm to freeze up, forcing a restart that would sometimes cause of the contents of memory storage to be lost. Thus all the user data would be lost and that Palm would be back to its factory settings, much to the annoyance and displeasure of those that just lost all their data and settings and forced to reinstall everything with the next sync. Despite this, most games tested played well on the emulator. They were later installed on Phem, the Android port of the POSE Palm emulator.

Android was inspired by Palm in a lot of ways, and as such, playing these games felt like I was at home, despite playing them on a platform far more recent than PalmOS. Granted, being a hardware emulator, these emulators also inherit the flaws that existed in the real devices. Despite these issues though, emulators like POSE and Phem have very good compatibility, works very well, and helps keeps these old games and applications alive on modern platforms.
Articles of Interest

Palm V - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_V

Palm OS Emulator - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS_Emulator

Palm, Inc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc.

Freescale DragonBall - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall

Palm (PDA) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)

3Com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com

Palm IIIc - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_IIIc

Drugwars - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars

Palm’s progress: The rise, fall—and rebirth—of a legendary brand - https://www.fastcompany.com/90246716/palms-progress-the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-a-legendary-brand

Palm: The Rise and Fall of a Legend - https://www.technobuffalo.com/palm-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-legend

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