5 ms·

StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

205 points by capitain 11mo ago

ckz 11mo ago
Thank you for supporting monochrome OS 3.5! Will be taking this for a spin. :)
waynecochran 11mo ago
There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- capitain 11mo ago
  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 build system worked.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    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?
    - simmons 11mo ago
      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.
    - lxgr 11mo ago
      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.
    - 3036e4 11mo ago
      I posted this 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479 "I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction." From looking at my old hoarded palm files I think that the interpreter was PalmPilotFrotz, still available on the if-archive: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/ https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreter...
      - anthk 11mo ago
        Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too. I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience. On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior. On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.
- felixding 11mo ago
  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 https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1-preface
  - 06e9 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - peaseagee 11mo ago
    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 https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  It was probably nowhere near as good as I remember, but I remember it being damn near perfect. I lovingly kept my Trio(s) well into the age of the touchscreen smartphone.
- supportengineer 11mo ago
  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.
- k3nx 11mo ago
  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.
- drivers99 11mo ago
  I loved that you could freely beam apps from one device to another via the infrared port. I remember sharing apps with my friend and my mom at one point, sending and/or receiving.
ktallett 11mo ago
I love this, I started coding for Mac OS 7-9 the other year in Think C and it reminded me why I originally loved it.
anthk 11mo ago
If you don't have a Palm: https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS
- lxgr 11mo ago
  https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ is a great option too (works in the browser, but even better as a PWA on iOS/Android).
- dmitrygr 11mo ago
  I dis-recommend this HLE, as I do all HLEs -- lack of bug-for-bug compat will eventually rear its ugly head. Use cloudpilot - a real emulator of the real hardware running real unmodified ROMs right in your browser.
spiffytech 11mo ago
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 continuous connectivity, asynchronous play was the default way games worked, so it worked great.
- dlcarrier 11mo ago
  I miss playing SubHunt (https://palmdb.net/app/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.
- henrebotha 11mo ago
  Oh my god, I had completely forgotten about that one until now.
alejoar 11mo ago
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 https://palmdb.net/app/space-war
- nick_ 11mo ago
  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.
- capitain 11mo ago
  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-moving-out-of-the-vaporware-phase-stargrids-alpha-release-is-here.html https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2025-05-06-2025...)
zubiaur 11mo ago
Perfect! A great game to play on the fisher price Pixter: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 (Dmitry is something else)
HeckFeck 11mo ago
Nice. It might struggle on my Palm IIIx, but I shall resurrect my Tungsten E2 as it will now have a purpose again!
crims0n 11mo ago
Love seeing modern development on legacy platforms. Seems like there is a toolchain for almost everything being maintained by some hero somewhere.
legitster 11mo ago
Damn, this brings back some nostalgia. As a kid I had my dad's old Pilot as well as a Sony Clie. I had so many free shareware games (shout out to classic PopCap).
- temperceve 11mo ago
  I know, right!? I have fond memories of my communicator.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  Insaniquarium was wild!
- Breza 11mo ago
  Whoa, did not expect to see a Sony Clie reference today. I had one in college! I loved taking notes with a folding keyboard, listening to music while playing games on the shuttle bus, and taking pictures with my friends. Oh man, memories.
- bokohut 11mo ago
  Yes, nostalgia. This teleported me mentally back to the 1990s as I love seeing the old things resurface, that pattern and cycle thing that always holds true. I recall sitting in board meetings playing games between other tech members as we had written simple games using the earliest means of direct connect device communication well before this was common. With the introduction of the Palm VII having the first mobile cellular smart device available and being a payment processor to large dotcoms at the time we of course we would also move into mobile payments on that Palm VII. This was yet another idea well before its time but it was fun working through the engineering issues of doing payments over cellular as well as satellite long ago. I still have NIB Palm VIIs with NIB payment cradles on my tech shelf of history, maybe some day I will dig them out again to play for inspiration and curiosity. Stay Healthy!
- MomsAVoxell 11mo ago
  Still got a Clie in a box, somewhere.
ohman876 11mo ago
I got memory error once enemy ship received second torpedo when played your game in browser :)
- capitain 11mo ago
  Fixed it! Thanks for reporting the problem.
rkagerer 11mo ago
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.
- dmitrygr 11mo ago
  Wish granted: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm I've been porting it to various devices, eg: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856, https://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-rp2350-powered-badge-sits-at-the-center-of-a-major-disagreement-05e96385a3dc https://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-rp235..., and possibly soon: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592
- paultopia 11mo ago
  Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.
  - rkagerer 11mo ago
    Do you mean the Enfora Wifi Sled? Had one of those too.
- MomsAVoxell 11mo ago
  I'd love to have it running on a watch, and the watch can be used to input Grafiti or whatever its called. A PalmOS watch would be a really nice counterpoint to the hegemony of Apple Watch. But that's about as likely to happen as an SGI Irix laptop.
  - e808 11mo ago
    Fossil watches actually released a palm-based watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA nobody could out-nerd me with that watch that lasted only a few hours per charge.
scottlu2 11mo ago
Very nice to see new PalmOS apps being written, and good job on your strategy game. I co-authored Warfare Incorporated, an RTS originally on Palm devices, if anyone remembers that. We had to pull out all the stops to get the perf and get it small enough to fit.
- vmlinuz 11mo ago
  I remember it well - thank you!
- capitain 11mo ago
  Oh cool Warfare Inc, that's quite the impressive game! Definitely remember that, it gets mentioned on the PalmDB discord quite often.
- dmitrygr 11mo ago
  My favourite PalmOS game! The OS 5 version is well done in that it properly adjusts to any screen resolution, including ones that no device ever shipped with. I often use it to test rePalm builds on new hardware. The OS 4 version was not as well done, so i had to patch it to support Dana widescreen and HE330 HVGA. Patched versions are here: https://palmdb.net/app/warfare-inc https://palmdb.net/app/warfare-inc For Dana, it was a simple binary patch. For HE330, a separate hack is needed that I had to write that 'enables Warfare'. Thus I called it "Kissinger" Here is your game running on a Fisher-Price Pixter with my rePalm project on it: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1977255077501939726 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1977255077501939726
  - scottlu2 11mo ago
    rePalm and the numerous projects on your home page are quite impressive. Nice to see WI running on it!
paultopia 11mo ago
I have to shamelessly show off my personal webpage, which is designed to be a rough emulation of how I remember palm OS looking back in the day, at least when you load it on a phone. https://gowder.io https://gowder.io --- took me way too long to hack together the CSS for this in like 2017 :-)
csnover 11mo ago
Last year I tried to extend Retro68 to support Palm OS and made quite a lot of progress, but in the end it ended up being too much work and I abandoned the attempt. I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that it exists (in a very ugly state with lots of unsquashed commits) in case anyone wants to pick up the mantle.[0] At the least, it has an up-to-date and functioning copy of the Palm OS Emulator which, unlike cloudpilot, retains the debugger code so you can actually debug apps with it.[1] (I also reverse-engineered the dana HAL; this is as far as I know the only open-source version of POSE which supports that hardware.) The thing that blocked me from being able to make any more progress was a bug in GCC that causes it to ICE generating PC-relative code[2], and I absolutely could not understand GIMPLE nor the GCC internals quickly, nor could I commit any more energy to trying to learn them. (Generating PC-relative code is essential for Palm OS because, unlike Mac OS, code sections are in read-only memory and cannot have relocations, so this mode being broken means it can’t really work.) It is fair to say that I have no idea how close to actually working things actually are in that fork since GCC/binutils are an absolute nightmare[3] and I am no compiler engineer. Retro68 has some scary-looking hacks to deal with exception handling which wouldn’t work as-is with Palm OS, at the least. (Retro68 is also itself quite a pile of hacks which were clearly made without a good understanding of how GCC works, and without any apparent care to making sure it is easy to rebase atop newer versions of GCC.) If I were to restart the work again I would probably just have GCC do the bare minimum of emitting code with whatever relocations it can, and then just make Elf2Mac rewrite machine code. Elf2Mac is itself fairly clearly an attempt to avoid having to touch binutils as much as possible, since it redoes a lot of the work that libbfd normally does, which makes sense, because working on GCC/binutils is just awful.[4] [0] https://github.com/csnover/Retro68/tree/palmos https://github.com/csnover/Retro68/tree/palmos [1] I tried to make the debugger work with the modern GDB remote protocol instead of the Palm-specific protocol which requires the ancient prc-tools version of GDB, but GDB is also broken <https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32120 https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32120>, so that never worked very well. GDB’s remote protocol also does not support receiving symbols from the remote on-demand for whatever reason—it only allows to receive an ABI-compatible binary with DWARF symbols, which makes it next to impossible to get symbols out of the ROM, which uses MacsBugs format. Working with DWARF also sucks. [2] I believe it was https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80786 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80786 [3] Just as a tiny example: never in my life have I ever considered that someone would solve the “tabs versus spaces” debate by making the rule “two spaces per indent, unless it is eight spaces, in which case use a tab”. What IDE even supports this?? [4] To be clear, I don’t mean to denigrate all the hard work that has been done over decades to create these tools. The GCC toolchain is a triumph and I am sure that my relative intelligence has something to do with why I struggle with it, compared to all the compiler people who happily work with it every day. Nevertheless, it is a forty-year-old codebase, and everyone seems quite content to continue to work more or less within constraints that made sense in the 1980s, and perhaps not so much in 2025.
fuzztester 11mo ago
I had a Palm V and later a Palm Zire (I think a model 21) when they were current. I would like to get a Palm or similar PIM device again, to actually use. Are there any devices like that, made by any company, these days? I don't mind it having no net connectivity, in fact I'd prefer that, as long as it has a way of doing backups and restores, and installing apps. I had searched somewhat, but so far did not find any, or maybe any at a suitable price. Edit: It would be a plus if it could run a light version of Python too. I had installed an app called Pippy (a Python for Palm) on my model V, but it used to crash all the time, so I stopped using it.

205 points by capitain 11mo ago

ckz 11mo ago

Thank you for supporting monochrome OS 3.5! Will be taking this for a spin. :)

waynecochran 11mo ago

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

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
capitain 11mo ago
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 build system worked.
- anthk 11mo ago
  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?
  - simmons 11mo ago
    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.
  - lxgr 11mo ago
    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.
  - 3036e4 11mo ago
    I posted this 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479 "I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction." From looking at my old hoarded palm files I think that the interpreter was PalmPilotFrotz, still available on the if-archive: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/ https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreter...
    - anthk 11mo ago
      Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too. I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience. On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior. On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.
felixding 11mo ago
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 https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1-preface
- 06e9 11mo ago
  [dead]
- peaseagee 11mo ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm
stronglikedan 11mo ago
It was probably nowhere near as good as I remember, but I remember it being damn near perfect. I lovingly kept my Trio(s) well into the age of the touchscreen smartphone.
supportengineer 11mo ago
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.
k3nx 11mo ago
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.
drivers99 11mo ago
I loved that you could freely beam apps from one device to another via the infrared port. I remember sharing apps with my friend and my mom at one point, sending and/or receiving.

ktallett 11mo ago

I love this, I started coding for Mac OS 7-9 the other year in Think C and it reminded me why I originally loved it.

anthk 11mo ago

If you don't have a Palm: https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS

lxgr 11mo ago
https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ is a great option too (works in the browser, but even better as a PWA on iOS/Android).
dmitrygr 11mo ago
I dis-recommend this HLE, as I do all HLEs -- lack of bug-for-bug compat will eventually rear its ugly head. Use cloudpilot - a real emulator of the real hardware running real unmodified ROMs right in your browser.

spiffytech 11mo ago

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 continuous connectivity, asynchronous play was the default way games worked, so it worked great.

dlcarrier 11mo ago
I miss playing SubHunt (https://palmdb.net/app/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.
henrebotha 11mo ago
Oh my god, I had completely forgotten about that one until now.

alejoar 11mo ago

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 https://palmdb.net/app/space-war

nick_ 11mo ago
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.
capitain 11mo ago
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-moving-out-of-the-vaporware-phase-stargrids-alpha-release-is-here.html https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2025-05-06-2025...)

zubiaur 11mo ago

Perfect! A great game to play on the fisher price Pixter: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 (Dmitry is something else)

HeckFeck 11mo ago

Nice. It might struggle on my Palm IIIx, but I shall resurrect my Tungsten E2 as it will now have a purpose again!

crims0n 11mo ago

Love seeing modern development on legacy platforms. Seems like there is a toolchain for almost everything being maintained by some hero somewhere.

legitster 11mo ago

Damn, this brings back some nostalgia. As a kid I had my dad's old Pilot as well as a Sony Clie. I had so many free shareware games (shout out to classic PopCap).

temperceve 11mo ago
I know, right!? I have fond memories of my communicator.
lxgr 11mo ago
Insaniquarium was wild!
Breza 11mo ago
Whoa, did not expect to see a Sony Clie reference today. I had one in college! I loved taking notes with a folding keyboard, listening to music while playing games on the shuttle bus, and taking pictures with my friends. Oh man, memories.
bokohut 11mo ago
Yes, nostalgia. This teleported me mentally back to the 1990s as I love seeing the old things resurface, that pattern and cycle thing that always holds true. I recall sitting in board meetings playing games between other tech members as we had written simple games using the earliest means of direct connect device communication well before this was common. With the introduction of the Palm VII having the first mobile cellular smart device available and being a payment processor to large dotcoms at the time we of course we would also move into mobile payments on that Palm VII. This was yet another idea well before its time but it was fun working through the engineering issues of doing payments over cellular as well as satellite long ago. I still have NIB Palm VIIs with NIB payment cradles on my tech shelf of history, maybe some day I will dig them out again to play for inspiration and curiosity. Stay Healthy!
MomsAVoxell 11mo ago
Still got a Clie in a box, somewhere.

ohman876 11mo ago

I got memory error once enemy ship received second torpedo when played your game in browser :)

capitain 11mo ago
Fixed it! Thanks for reporting the problem.

rkagerer 11mo ago

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.

dmitrygr 11mo ago
Wish granted: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm I've been porting it to various devices, eg: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856, https://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-rp2350-powered-badge-sits-at-the-center-of-a-major-disagreement-05e96385a3dc https://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-rp235..., and possibly soon: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592
paultopia 11mo ago
Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.
- rkagerer 11mo ago
  Do you mean the Enfora Wifi Sled? Had one of those too.
MomsAVoxell 11mo ago
I'd love to have it running on a watch, and the watch can be used to input Grafiti or whatever its called. A PalmOS watch would be a really nice counterpoint to the hegemony of Apple Watch. But that's about as likely to happen as an SGI Irix laptop.
- e808 11mo ago
  Fossil watches actually released a palm-based watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA nobody could out-nerd me with that watch that lasted only a few hours per charge.

scottlu2 11mo ago

Very nice to see new PalmOS apps being written, and good job on your strategy game. I co-authored Warfare Incorporated, an RTS originally on Palm devices, if anyone remembers that. We had to pull out all the stops to get the perf and get it small enough to fit.

vmlinuz 11mo ago
I remember it well - thank you!
capitain 11mo ago
Oh cool Warfare Inc, that's quite the impressive game! Definitely remember that, it gets mentioned on the PalmDB discord quite often.
dmitrygr 11mo ago
My favourite PalmOS game! The OS 5 version is well done in that it properly adjusts to any screen resolution, including ones that no device ever shipped with. I often use it to test rePalm builds on new hardware. The OS 4 version was not as well done, so i had to patch it to support Dana widescreen and HE330 HVGA. Patched versions are here: https://palmdb.net/app/warfare-inc https://palmdb.net/app/warfare-inc For Dana, it was a simple binary patch. For HE330, a separate hack is needed that I had to write that 'enables Warfare'. Thus I called it "Kissinger" Here is your game running on a Fisher-Price Pixter with my rePalm project on it: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1977255077501939726 https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1977255077501939726
- scottlu2 11mo ago
  rePalm and the numerous projects on your home page are quite impressive. Nice to see WI running on it!

paultopia 11mo ago

I have to shamelessly show off my personal webpage, which is designed to be a rough emulation of how I remember palm OS looking back in the day, at least when you load it on a phone. https://gowder.io https://gowder.io --- took me way too long to hack together the CSS for this in like 2017 :-)

csnover 11mo ago

Last year I tried to extend Retro68 to support Palm OS and made quite a lot of progress, but in the end it ended up being too much work and I abandoned the attempt. I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that it exists (in a very ugly state with lots of unsquashed commits) in case anyone wants to pick up the mantle.[0] At the least, it has an up-to-date and functioning copy of the Palm OS Emulator which, unlike cloudpilot, retains the debugger code so you can actually debug apps with it.[1] (I also reverse-engineered the dana HAL; this is as far as I know the only open-source version of POSE which supports that hardware.) The thing that blocked me from being able to make any more progress was a bug in GCC that causes it to ICE generating PC-relative code[2], and I absolutely could not understand GIMPLE nor the GCC internals quickly, nor could I commit any more energy to trying to learn them. (Generating PC-relative code is essential for Palm OS because, unlike Mac OS, code sections are in read-only memory and cannot have relocations, so this mode being broken means it can’t really work.) It is fair to say that I have no idea how close to actually working things actually are in that fork since GCC/binutils are an absolute nightmare[3] and I am no compiler engineer. Retro68 has some scary-looking hacks to deal with exception handling which wouldn’t work as-is with Palm OS, at the least. (Retro68 is also itself quite a pile of hacks which were clearly made without a good understanding of how GCC works, and without any apparent care to making sure it is easy to rebase atop newer versions of GCC.) If I were to restart the work again I would probably just have GCC do the bare minimum of emitting code with whatever relocations it can, and then just make Elf2Mac rewrite machine code. Elf2Mac is itself fairly clearly an attempt to avoid having to touch binutils as much as possible, since it redoes a lot of the work that libbfd normally does, which makes sense, because working on GCC/binutils is just awful.[4] [0] https://github.com/csnover/Retro68/tree/palmos https://github.com/csnover/Retro68/tree/palmos [1] I tried to make the debugger work with the modern GDB remote protocol instead of the Palm-specific protocol which requires the ancient prc-tools version of GDB, but GDB is also broken <https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32120 https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32120>, so that never worked very well. GDB’s remote protocol also does not support receiving symbols from the remote on-demand for whatever reason—it only allows to receive an ABI-compatible binary with DWARF symbols, which makes it next to impossible to get symbols out of the ROM, which uses MacsBugs format. Working with DWARF also sucks. [2] I believe it was https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80786 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80786 [3] Just as a tiny example: never in my life have I ever considered that someone would solve the “tabs versus spaces” debate by making the rule “two spaces per indent, unless it is eight spaces, in which case use a tab”. What IDE even supports this?? [4] To be clear, I don’t mean to denigrate all the hard work that has been done over decades to create these tools. The GCC toolchain is a triumph and I am sure that my relative intelligence has something to do with why I struggle with it, compared to all the compiler people who happily work with it every day. Nevertheless, it is a forty-year-old codebase, and everyone seems quite content to continue to work more or less within constraints that made sense in the 1980s, and perhaps not so much in 2025.

fuzztester 11mo ago

I had a Palm V and later a Palm Zire (I think a model 21) when they were current. I would like to get a Palm or similar PIM device again, to actually use. Are there any devices like that, made by any company, these days? I don't mind it having no net connectivity, in fact I'd prefer that, as long as it has a way of doing backups and restores, and installing apps. I had searched somewhat, but so far did not find any, or maybe any at a suitable price. Edit: It would be a plus if it could run a light version of Python too. I had installed an app called Pippy (a Python for Palm) on my model V, but it used to crash all the time, so I stopped using it.