Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

ctrl-c.club

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 112 posts

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#41

Post by tomcam »

ok_dad wrote: post #36
tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

> bug-free children I know you didn't mean anything by it, and it was a pretty funny joke, but children with bugs are pretty cool as well :)

Two of ours were born with severe handicaps but they are all insanely fun and fabulously good company. Not sure why my sibling comment was flagged.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#42

Post by HFguy »

tomcam wrote: post #41
ok_dad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bug-free children I know you didn't mean anything by it, and it was a pretty funny joke, but children with bugs are pretty cool as well :)

Two of ours were born with severe handicaps but they are all insanely fun and fabulously good company. Not sure why my sibling comment was flagged.

Love that!!!

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#43

Post by lxgr »

Amazing work, thank you!

I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia:

I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases...

Take Apotris, for example: I've bought (and probably will buy) a lot of official Tetris versions over the years, but here's an incredibly slick implementation I can play on all of my consoles, or even on any computer without installation (thanks to WASM-based GBA emulators like RetroArch Web and modern browsers having native gamepad support).

Besides that, there's just something comforting with having a single, self-contained executable that I know I can in all likelihood run one, ten, twenty years from now – which is probably not true for many iOS or even web indie games I otherwise really like.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#44

Post by rkagerer »

lxgr wrote: post #43

Amazing work, thank you! I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia: I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases... Take Apotris, for examp…

I would love a modern Palm OS phone, that's true to the original UI philosophies and could run (even if just through emulation) all my old titles.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#45

Post by grimgrin »

ok_dad wrote: post #36
tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

> bug-free children I know you didn't mean anything by it, and it was a pretty funny joke, but children with bugs are pretty cool as well :)

We call them features

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#46

Post by lxgr »

rkagerer wrote: post #44
lxgr wrote: post #43

Amazing work, thank you! I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia: I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases... Take Apotris, for examp…

I would love a modern Palm OS phone, that's true to the original UI philosophies and could run (even if just through emulation) all my old titles.

Take all of this with a big grain of salt due to rosy retrospection, but I feel like a big appeal of Palm OS was that going online was an intentional activity (if possible at all; most of my handhelds had neither mobile data nor Wi-Fi).

As a result, it was completely distraction-free: I'd queue up news/articles (via Plucker), mail, and books for the day, HotSync in the morning/evening, and then that was it – no chance of any notification (other than pre-programmed local reminders/appointments) popping up and disrupting whatever I was doing.

Other than that, there was still more than enough to do ~forever: More Ebooks on a 64 MB MMC than I could reasonably read all summer, the top 100? 1000? Wikipedia articles, the CIA World Factbook as a PalmDoc, Space Trader... Ok, enough with the nostalgia :)

(If this brought back a fond memory or two, head on over to https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ right now!)

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#48

Post by lxgr »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #3

Wondering if I could run this on real hardware, I realized I have no idea what happened to my Palm LifeDrive when I changed to Blackberries. I miss that little chunky PDA. It was amazing for its time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeDrive

The LifeDrive was such a weird Palm!

On one hand I hated it, for its infuriating loading times compared to its predecessors (due to the hard drive spinning up for ~every unexpected memory access of an OS designed for having everything in RAM/ROM and literally no concept of file/block based memory at first) and its relative bulk.

On the other hand: Four! Gigabytes! That could hold more than two full movies! It was also my first Palm having Wi-Fi, which was nice.

All in all, to me it was a symbol of Palm quickly losing touch with modern developments: For example Symbian was miles ahead from an OS point of view, even though usability was nothing compared to Palm OS, and then there was the iPhone and Android, of course.

Post reply on HN