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StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

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Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#14

Post by dlcarrier »

spiffytech wrote: post #10

I have dreams of porting the old Strategic Commander game to newer devices. Someday I hope it rises to the top of my todo list. I logged hundreds of hours on that game playing with my friends and brother. Taking turns via IR blaster or pass-and-play was amazing in an era without wifi or cellular data. No account signups or anything, just point your devices at each other and you had a game going. And without continuou…

I miss playing SubHunt (https://palmdb.net/app/subhunt) and I can't find any remakes for other systems.

It's easy to get it going in an emulator, but I'm surprised games of that type never caught on, in their own right.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#15

Post by anthk »

capitain wrote: post #3
waynecochran wrote: post #2

There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?

It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing. It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time. No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing. And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole b…

Are the Z-Machine games (Infocom text adventures and the ones from the 90's made with Inform6 and 7 in the 00's) really playable with a stylus input?

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#16

Post by simmons »

anthk wrote: post #15
capitain wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing. It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time. No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing. And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole b…

Are the Z-Machine games (Infocom text adventures and the ones from the 90's made with Inform6 and 7 in the 00's) really playable with a stylus input?

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#17

Post by peaseagee »

felixding wrote: post #6
waynecochran wrote: post #2

There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?

Zen of Palm Mobile app developers, if you haven't read Zen of Palm, I highly recommend this piece of art. You can download the PDF for free. Nothing beats Palm for its simplicity, responsiveness, and (perhaps subjectively) ease of use, even to this day. I wrote a series of blog posts about it nearly two decades ago, and later translated some parts into English: https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1-preface

Unfortunately that link to the Zen of Palm PDF is broken (at least from my work machine). I couldn't find it in the Internet Archive either. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Disregard, found it: https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#19

Post by supportengineer »

waynecochran wrote: post #2

There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?

The amount of energy and creativity. I had an orange Handspring Visor. By default it did not have any networking. It had a cradle that you would sync up with your desktop, but the desktop software could pull stuff from the Internet. So indirectly, the Handspring Visor could access content from the Internet that had been previously retrieved. There was an amazing app that was kind of like Yelp. You could enter your location by specifying two cross streets, and then you could search businesses and read reviews. I used this PDA to manage my calendar and my contacts. With a limited amount of email. In the year 2000 I was using this thing exactly the way we all use our smart phones today. And the games were so much fun. It was truly a machine that could do anything.
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