[HN Gopher] StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game
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StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game
Author : capitain
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-10-21 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (quarters.captaintouch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (quarters.captaintouch.com)
| waynecochran wrote:
| There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it
| about Palm OS that you love?
| capitain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| felixding wrote:
| 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
| peaseagee wrote:
| 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
| stronglikedan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you don't have a Palm:
|
| https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS
| lxgr wrote:
| https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ is a great option too (works
| in the browser, but even better as a PWA on iOS/Android).
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| henrebotha wrote:
| Oh my god, I had completely forgotten about that one until now.
| alejoar wrote:
| 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
| nick_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...)
| zubiaur wrote:
| Perfect! A great game to play on the fisher price Pixter:
|
| https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856
|
| (Dmitry is something else)
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Nice. It might struggle on my Palm IIIx, but I shall resurrect my
| Tungsten E2 as it will now have a purpose again!
| crims0n wrote:
| Love seeing modern development on legacy platforms. Seems like
| there is a toolchain for almost everything being maintained by
| some hero somewhere.
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I know, right!? I have fond memories of my communicator.
| lxgr wrote:
| Insaniquarium was wild!
| Breza wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| ckz wrote:
| Thank you for supporting monochrome OS 3.5! Will be taking this
| for a spin. :)
| ohman876 wrote:
| I got memory error once enemy ship received second torpedo when
| played your game in browser :)
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wish granted:
| 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://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-
| rp235...,
|
| and possibly soon:
| https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592
| paultopia wrote:
| 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.
| scottlu2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I remember it well - thank you!
| capitain wrote:
| Oh cool Warfare Inc, that's quite the impressive game!
| Definitely remember that, it gets mentioned on the PalmDB
| discord quite often.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 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
|
| 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
| paultopia wrote:
| 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 --- took me way too long to hack together the
| CSS for this in like 2017 :-)
| csnover wrote:
| 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
|
| [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>, 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
|
| [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.
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