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StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

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Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#23

Post by nick_ »

alejoar wrote: post #11

I used to play around with my dad's already old by then Palm (can't remember the model) in the early 2000's. This game reminded me of Space War https://palmdb.net/app/space-war

Space War was great! Briefly in high school a few of my friends and I all had Palm OS devices.

I taught myself to crack palm apps and games, and with Space War I modified the strength of my ship. The IR multiplayer had no validation of parameters so I pranked my friends in an IR multiplayer match by one-shotting them all and zooming across the whole map in one turn! Great times.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#24

Post by k3nx »

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 OS itself I'm not sure of.

Developing for is was a fun challenge. I had a device that had 4MB of memory total. This was RAM, Data, and application space. I created an "app" that had plugins. When you ran the HotSync is asked which plugins you wanted to "install", then based on which ones were installed it copied over the data you needed.

I loved the documentation. It might be the only SDK documentation I read with joy. It just clicked with me.

Gremlins. I liked this program as well. I don't recall if it was a simulator only or if it ran across on device. You could tell it to just wreck havoc on your app. I would set it up to run over the evening or weekend and I would just fix any bugs that occurred during that time. It would click every button, add weird text to all input boxes, just smash everything. It found many issues for me. When I came back over the weekend and there were no issues, I shipped my app. I still had users running it up until 2010.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#25

Post by lxgr »

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?

There were many keyboard accessories for Palm OS devices!

I had a foldable one with (almost?) full-sized keys that I really enjoyed using. It connected via infrared, which was a bit strange but made it compatible with different generations of device connectors.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#28

Post by rkagerer »

I would love for a widespread PalmOS revival!

I'm not talking so much about the devices, as the whole experience. The exquisite UI, the distraction-free atmosphere, the lack of ads and dark patterns like tracking, the elegant simplicity, the efficient Graffiti language, and, yes, the reprogrammable physical buttons.

Re: StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

#29

Post by capitain »

alejoar wrote: post #11

I used to play around with my dad's already old by then Palm (can't remember the model) in the early 2000's. This game reminded me of Space War https://palmdb.net/app/space-war

I think I mentioned it in an earlier blog post, Space War was actually the big inspiration to make this game hex-tile based. Happy to see I'm not the only one that remembers that game! (found it: https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2025-05-06-2025...)
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