A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

https://ctrl-c.club/~captain/posts/2024-08-29-holy-smokes-I-Just-released-a-minigolf-game-for-palmos-in-2024.html

by capitain • 2 years ago

325 95 2 years ago

ctrl-c.club

xnx2• 2 years ago

You need to promote this to projectionists so they can play it on their IMAX systems.

71bw3• 2 years ago

Care to explain? I'm obviously out of some loop here.

xnx2• 2 years ago

"IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817900

ASalazarMX• 2 years ago

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

sodaplayer• 2 years ago

I just came across my old Palm Tungsten E2 last week while doing some cleaning. If I can also find its charger, I'll report back on running it.

Zobat• 2 years ago

I've come across my box of Palms a few times and had limited success getting them going. Seems they don't like being in storage for almost two decades. Really loved my Palms back then.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

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.

cebu_blue• 2 years ago

I love this and love the art design especially. Great job! The only thing I would change persoanlly is that i think it feels more natural to go in thge opposite direction with the mouse when you're aiming. Many mini golf games on Miniclip used to do it that way. Also if you're a fan of FOSS games i recommend Neverball and Neverput which is a 3d golf similator with nice graphics

aliher1911• 2 years ago

Original Palm was using stylus so you don't obscure where you are aiming compared to finger touch phones and having more space in the direction of shot could be the factors.

zzanz• 2 years ago

Interesting project. I would say the issues had, memory leaks. debugging, etc are a lot more common in game dev than you might expect. Much of these problems have been abstracted away by game engines such as Unreal/Unity/Godot, but if you were to go into game dev with C, OpenGL, and a memory restriction (especially when hardware enforced), you might run into the same teething issues.

The level editor is a nice touch, I would be curious on the implementation as something in the same vein existed for the Tony Hawk series of games and was responsible for "Tony Hawks Pro StrCpy" https://icode4.coffee/?p=954 . Though jailbreaking and arbitrary code execution is probably a lot easier achieved via PalmOS than a minigolf side project.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

The game is really fun when played in the browser-based emulator. I nearly got sucked into practice mode.

IMO: I'd love a port (or otherwise inspired by) version for Android / iOS / in-browser. It's really fun.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

Great job! Just from the video I could tell this is fun. This is what games are supposed to be.

teruakohatu• 2 years ago

I have been using CloudPilot [1] to play a bunch of retro Palm games on iOS. It works reasonably well. Hopefully a native emulator will be released now allows emulators.

[1] https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/app-preview/#/tab/sessions

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

This is beautiful! And now I'm nostalgic for my IIIxe. Through the rose colored glasses of poor remembrance, that might've been peek productivity in a handheld. It had enough functionality to remember all the things I cared to have on my person at all times, but was utterly lacking in notifications about distractions. It took me a while to quiet my iPhone so that it's not always pestering the hell out of me, but Palm was opt-in. If you didn't tell it to tell you about something, it kept its mouth shut.

I wouldn't actually go back if I could, but part of me misses that.

freedomben• 2 years ago

I feel the same. I loved my IIIxe. I'm guessing we'd be horrified at the UX now if we could go back, but at the time it was a huge boost in productivity. The handwriting language was really great. I actually wrote papers on that thing! It was great, I could work on papers while on the bus or travelling, without having to lug around a laptop. Remarkable devices.

i80and• 2 years ago

So I actually bought a Palm Classic device to test the hypothesis that my memories are nostelgia.

They're not! It's actually a great UX!

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

I played with an emulator (https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/) recently and it's honestly not that bad at all. The resolution is bad by today's standards but the basics are all there. It even has a system-wide search that looks for the input string in all your apps and lets you tap right into those records. That's pretty handy!

I like my phone too much to go back, but if I had to, I could make do.

Telemakhos• 2 years ago

Control over notifications is one of the most powerful UX features available. I make extensive use of geo- and time-based focus modes for the few notifications that I ever allow.

nanna2• 2 years ago

Is there an app store for palm is, or somewhere you can browse different apps at least?

dmitrygr2• 2 years ago

PalmDB

eichin2• 2 years ago

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_palm is a good place to start (and you can just run them in-browser via cloudpilot.)

nanna2• 2 years ago

Very cool !

lycos• 2 years ago

Back in the day I think most people got their apps from the PalmGear website (https://web.archive.org/web/20010331040533/http://palmgear.c...) and sync it to their Palm device via HotSync (later Palm Desktop)

andrewshadura• 2 years ago

It would be really cool if someone wrote something like WINE to allow running PalmOS applications on Android.

dmitrygr2• 2 years ago

It would have similar problems to WINE, without nearly as many developers who understand the bug compatibility required. One project (pumpkinos) tried but there are many apps that don’t work in it. Emulation is easier. And accurate. Source: I believe at this point I am the highest authority left on PalmOS

AshamedCaptain• 2 years ago

https://styletap.com/

classichasclass2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, apparently not compatible with Android 14 (there's a warning about this on the website). On my Pixel 7 Pro, it says "not compatible with your phone."

xrd• 2 years ago

The post suggests getting a real device. Where the heck do you get a real device these days? Is there some retro hardware out there? An open source project where you send out a PCB order to Shenzhen?

flymasterv• 2 years ago

eBay has new-in-box Zires for $10.

eichin2• 2 years ago

ebay; the hardware has lasted surprisingly well. (That said, chrome on a recent samsung phone runs CloudPilot very responsively, start here https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_palm and you can just click on things and run them...)

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

I am not very familiar with Palm OS, but I do like the idea of a smart device that isn’t a full on smartphone. Something like the old Palm devices or the Pocket PCs from 25 years ago. Is there such a thing today? What gets closest?

two_cents• 2 years ago

BOOX Palma maybe? https://shop.boox.com/products/palma

JKCalhoun5• 2 years ago

Miniature golf was a game I began twice for the Macintosh back in the 1990's but never ended up completing/shipping.

I've just recently been trying to recover my nearly 35 year old sources and create disk images for use on an emulator. The first B&W attempt at MiniGolf is here: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-UnfinishedTa...

The second attempt (when I was a better programmer) was in color ... will make it on Volume 2. (I'm currently trying to put that disk image together.)

aresant• 2 years ago

Glider was THE franchise of the 68k mac era, I am more than a little starstruck, glad to see that you are back at it!

JKCalhoun5• 2 years ago

It's kind of for nostalgia that I am putting together all the sources, artwork, projects, (tools) on a disk image suitable for emulators. To me it has been fun trying to go through old hard drives and find the "almost rans" like MiniGolf (and later LiliPutz).

The shareware and commercial games (Glider, etc.) are on disk images in other repos. (You should be able to find them easily if you care to.)

ElCapitanMarkla• 2 years ago

You have some amazing graphics there. Love the style

JKCalhoun5• 2 years ago

There is something about black and white pixel art....

InsideOutSanta• 2 years ago

I played so much Glider as a kid. This is probably the only opportunity I ever get to say this, so: thank you very much for your games!

JKCalhoun5• 2 years ago

Thank you. I enjoyed writing it.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Thank you John! This repo has a little of everything I love: art, engineering, history, but mostly art. It's truly inspiring.

JKCalhoun5• 2 years ago

When I redid Glypha (an old shareware game I wrote) last year for Steam, I decided to go with B&W pixel art for the game — even though in other ways I bent to modern hardware (a larger 16:9 screen size for example).

That B&W pixel art definitely was a defining feature of the era.

post_break• 2 years ago

I miss bike or die. For a while it was on iOS but didn’t get updates. I had hours in that game.

harikb2• 2 years ago

I have the Original PalmPilot, hardware upgraded to 3.0, as part of a beta program. I also have a few Palm 3's. Is there a compiled PDB available?

classichasclass2• 2 years ago

A Pilot 1000/5000 or the immediate model after?

Also, I think you meant a .prc.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

As far as I remember, the two extensions are mostly interchangeable, and are only used as a convention to indicate whether a given file contains an executable application or data.

Palm OS doesn't really have a concept of files; everything's a record-oriented database, containing either resources, including executable code, or data. Palm Desktop would just queue up every .prc or .pdb for copying during the next HotSync. (I've never tested it, but presumably renaming a .prc to .pdb and installing it would lead to it being backed up as a .prc.)

For some reason, Mobipocket (which was originally a Palm OS based ebook format) has landed on using .prc over .pdb for their books, which are definitely not executable, so every once in a while I stumble over a book with a .prc extension and it annoys me ever so slightly – it'll work, but that should be a .pdb :)

harikb2• 2 years ago

It was called Palm Pilot - the one pictured as the very first image in Wikipedia [1]. It still works, except for some bleeding/damage on a portion of the e-Ink screen. I probably need to find the appropriate Linux based tools to load the .PRC. I wonder if this [2] still works

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot

[2] https://shallowsky.com/linux/palmlinuxdev.html

tomcam8• 2 years ago

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 long it would take to even get started, I estimated about 18 months to learn C++ properly, another six months to learn Microsoft foundation classes. The six months after that to learn the windows API if she worked really hard at it. At the time I thought maybe there was a place in the Windows game market for a mini golf game.

She took less than a week to create a working, bug-free prototype, but then lost interest.

I hate people like that! Everything takes forever for me to learn.

Luckily she blessed me with a passel of pretty much bug-free and absolutely hilarious children, so I’m giving her a pass.

smabie• 2 years ago

If you're laser focused on a end product then learning can happen remarkably quickly.

tomcam8• 2 years ago

Yeah no. I am an atrociously slow learner.

ok_dad• 2 years ago

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 :)

tomcam8• 2 years ago

SO SO TRUE

tomcam8• 2 years ago

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.

grimgrin• 2 years ago

We call them features

al_borland• 2 years ago

Is this the difference between learning and doing? You were looking at how long it would take to learn all the foundational technologies, once that was done, she could start to code the game. Where she took the on-the-job-training approach. Work on the project, run into a problem, learn enough to solve said problem. Repeat until done.

I’m usually the learn before I start type as well, though I find it doesn’t really work for me in practice. It ends up becoming a form of procrastination.

tomcam8• 2 years ago

She says much the same thing as you. I appear to be unable to learn something without going to first principles.

darby_nine• 2 years ago

She took less than a week to create a working, bug-free prototype, but then lost interest.

This is pretty common, no? Same reason why everyone thinks AI will change development: people mistake the initial time cost of building an initial prototype for being representative of the total cost of making the thing people actually demand (which mostly never happens).

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

I love it! Quick suggestion: allow a moment to show the ball dropping into the hole before loading the next level. It might be frustrating denying the player that satisfaction.

snozolli• 2 years ago

I wrote code for PalmOS back around '99. One thing that stands out in my memory is the way that applications were tested. I think it was a feature of the emulator, which would fire events at your software. I forget the details, but if you could make, say, 1,000 events without crashing, it was passable, 10k was good, and 100k was excellent.

Well, I thought I was a reasonable competent C++ programmer and I was shocked at how quickly my application would crash using this tool. It was an extremely humbling experience that really opened my eyes. I often think of how effective that simple tool was at revealing bugs, but it's obviously not something that works in today's multitasking, Internet-connected devices.

The other thing I remember is CodeWarrior being the first IDE I used that had a drop-down box with all the functions in the current source file. That was a pretty big step forward in productivity.

Incidentally, I was still using a Palm Tungsten as late as 2010, when I was in Japan. There was a very simple Japanese dictionary application for Palm. Once you learn the basic rules for stroke order and direction, you could mimic any character you see using the stylus and do a dictionary search for matching Kanji. I was able to figure out a lot of navigation just by mimicking unknown Kanji that I saw on signs.

sgt• 2 years ago

I just had a vision of someone trying to port Rust to PalmOS. Let's hope that never happens.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 2 years ago

drop-down box with all the functions

I remember the “#pragma -“ to separate the functions. We don’t have this anymore. As an alternative we have “#pragma region” to fold blocks of code but it’s different.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

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.

rkagerer• 2 years ago

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.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

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!)

kalleboo• 2 years ago

There is a guy who has gotten Palm OS running on modern ARM hardware http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

mjcohen• 2 years ago

For the Amiga, one of my favorite games was "Hole-in-one Miniature Golf."

xer0x• 2 years ago

Wow, I can't believe this! That looks awesome!

DevScout• 2 years ago

Great work! It's incredible to see projects like this still going in 2024.

debo_• 2 years ago

I appreciate that you named the source directory `sauce` instead. It's the little things that matter.

capitain3• 2 years ago

It should be the industry standard imo

sunnybeetroot• 2 years ago

I think my OCD would prevent me from ever doing this :’(

Yhippa• 2 years ago

This made me so happy. I'm going to go look for my Handspring Visor now...

yding• 2 years ago

As someone who interned at Palm, love this so much!

capitain3• 2 years ago

Oh wow, do you have any interesting stories from back then? Saw some unreleased prototypes?

kleiba2• 2 years ago

Looks great!

Have you considered adding a "ball dropping into the hole" animation? In the video, it looks like a new level is loaded as soon as the ball and the whole overlap to a sufficient degree. I think from a user's perspective, it would be much more satisfying to somehow see the ball go in. It would give you more of a sense of achievement before the next level is loaded.

What do you think?

capitain3• 2 years ago

I am considering it now, thanks!

kleiba2• 2 years ago

I also noticed that the collision detection is not always perfect. Here's a screenshot from one of your videos where the ball is rolling over the side barrier: https://imgur.com/a/2tW1EOK

samatman• 2 years ago

I would think that shrinking the ball circle to nothing would do the job. Look forward to seeing what you come up with. ^_^

ricardobayes• 2 years ago

Amazing game, gives the same level of excitement (and frustration) as playing real mini golf. Thank you!

wingerlang• 2 years ago

Once I got a Zire 31 with PalmOS for Christmas. It became quite a fun treasure hunt to find free games and software for it. And I say treasure hunt because it was like looking for gems among piles of garbage as far as I can remember.

pantulis• 2 years ago

This made me remember the Zany Golf bouncy burgers! The hours I spent there!

geon• 2 years ago

You should add a short celebration before loading the next level. The "Loading" text feels very abrupt, like you did something wrong.

Display something like the text "Nice!", and try to avoid covering the hole, so that the player can see the ball disappearing into the hole.

Wait just half a second before you show the loading dialog. You can probably skip the loading dialog entirely if it is as short as it looks like in the video.

dopp0• 2 years ago

Thanks for the memories. Good old times I was programming in SuperWaba for palmOS!

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

This is really cool and brings back lots of memories. I've a curious question for the game devs among you. One of the things that makes put put fun is the possibility of a hole in one. How do you make sure this is actually possible in a game like this?

msielski• 2 years ago

Ahh good memories. I wrote Pente for PalmOS back in 2004 or 2005, complete with a computer opponent using a minimax tree with alpha/beta pruning. Unfortunately I never finished or released it. It was so much fun to do early mobile development - it compared to nothing else I'd done at the time. And it wasn't easy. This is definitely an accomplishment.

ceedan• 2 years ago

Having up and down slopes on the different holes would be an interesting and challenging addition.

A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

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