Game-development on Compaq iPaq

kilaasi writes "Some hard-core game-developers from Finland is making super-optimized games for the iPaq and similar devices, tweaking and tuning every bit of piece there is. These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."

Uhm...

These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull."

I keep telling my sweetie that, but she doesnt believe me.

+external monitor === portable mame

::)

Less is more

It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.

If that same rule holds true for the iPaq, it might become one of the best gaming systems ever conceived. :-)

Yeah, but... what about the buttons?

It's great that they're doing this - it will certainly allow for some cool games in the future, but not quite yet... the iPaq has a hardware "feature" that prevents programs from detecting simultaneous usage of more than one button. Nothing sucks more than having to stop moving so you can shoot or jump. To counter this, developers have built "virtual buttons" that appear on the touch screen, but this takes up alot of the already limited screen realty. Plues, its hard to get used to not having the underappreciated tactile feedback of physical buttons.

and what about old acorn hacks ?

people have been eeking out performance out of ARM cpus (ipaq is just a strongARM clone) for a very long time
since the ol acorn in the corner of this roomcan atest to

did a space invaders clone when I was 15 should dig that out (-;

really you should look at the GBA as its the same ISA but instead of a pultry 78MHz on GBA its a whooping 200Mhz on the IPAQ

equate that with moveing from a 486 to a P200 and you get the idea !
(yeah yeah not the same, RISC, improved piplines.... give it a rest I know already)

should be relitvly easy to do a GBA clone on the IPAQ as its the same ISA why havent we seen this before ?

regards

john jones

C64 Demo Scene?

Anyone remember what Future Crew's C-64 demos were?

I remember a C-64 demo called "Edge of Insanity", which displayed (amidst a funky backbeat) a hysterical tale of blood, gore, and doom that went on for page after page after page.

Anyone remember the original authors of this thing?

I'm damned if I can confirm it, but I vaguely remember a reference to Future Crew. But it was a hell of a long time ago, I no longer have the disk, and I could be confusing it with some other demo I enjoyed about the same time. But I do remember Future Crew from way the hell back. Far fucking out to see them still kicking ass.

nothing "small" about an iPaq

"Small is beautiful"? These people are programming a machine with a 200MHz RISC chip with 32Mbytes of memory. That isn't small, that's high-end desk-top performance of a few years ago.

iPAQ is a great device, more amazing stuff soon!

i'm using ibm via voice to control the screen on a bluetooth enabled pocket pc 2002 with 128 mb sd card, connecting to a ericsson t68 with bluetooth and using gprs. the 64k colors look great, the sound is stellar. most folks here trash microsoft no matter what they do, but the pocket pc 2002 os is amazing so is the compaq hardware. i tip my hat to ms on this, nicely done.

Collapsing dimensions

The PCs are bulky. Those 3D games make sense on PC.

But PDA are small and flat. The PDA games should be 2D.

What we need now is 1D-game. If you know what I mean.

Unreal?

Fathammer founder Samuli Syvähuoko helped write Unreal, a 3-D demo that ran on old 386 PCs

I wonder if the engine could be rigged to run something else by that name.

Future Crew

I see a good portion of these people are the same people who were in the Future Crew demo group. Those guys made the coolest demos. Hell, they are still fairly cool. Skaven and Purple Motion are actually decent composers. I still listen to the music from Unreal 2 once in a while. Back in around 93 I found their demos on a local BBS. I hadn't seen anything that good before (on a PC). I purchased Max Payne and though it was pretty good, I didn't realise until now that they were the same people.

Romero doing iPaq games

I'm suprised that you didn't mention that John Romero and Co have moved to making games for the iPaq at MonkeyStone Games [monkeystone.com].

Not only are they making games for them, but also trying to base a business on them.

Future Crew, Demos, Elegant Code...

Wow, the good ol' days. I was late, I didn't start getting around to the demoscene until Second Reality came out at Assembly'94. Then I was hooked. There were many hoaxes of "Third Reality" coming out at the next big demoparty, as I recall.

A lot of the old FC crew created a company called "Remedy" which creates the 3dmark benchmarks and recently released the game Max Payne. Purple Motion even did the music for part of 3dmark2001.

A few people on an IRC channel I used to frequent just found a 64k intro from The Party 2000. They said "wow, when did people do this?" When I started telling them about the good ol days of MS-DOS and the demos and intros (and 4k intros!) of that time, they all turned their noses and said "EWWW DOS was NEVER good for ANYTHING! Yuck!"

Of course, back then, the amount of polygons you could fit on a torus was the big challenge. It was what originally got me into programming. I feel so old now.

Of course now, it's so easy to create jaw dropping images without optimized code, so it's nice to see that there is something to really test your skills on like the iPaq. I miss seeing elegant code.

It's About Time..

It is about time that programmers realize that embedded systems are not desktops. Hard drives are not an option with these things.

More attention needs to be placed not only on making smaller programs perform better, but getting the program to perform closer to the hardware specs. This is what programming used to do with Assembler.

Lost art?

"The skills you need to optimize a software rasterizer and make it cross-platform have been forgotten by programmers relying on today's beefy (desktop) PC and console machines," said Fathammer CEO Brian Bruning. "It's something of a lost art."

I'm curious to know why this is such a lost art. Could it be due to the fact that most engines are proprietary code? Did this lead to a state where a limited number of people have access to the code? Even fewer that would want to muck with 'legacy' code in the engine? What about publishing this in a book? I've read "The Black Art of Game Programming" which I found informative; Does this book not dive into the secrets? What are the secrets? It occurs to me that maybe these lost arts come from optimizing solutions to specific hardware platforms. Could these skills be lost because of the hardware dependencies, where as the evolution of software engineering has gravitated toward abstractions such as portability and a more OOP structure? If the knowledge of the art were important or interesting enough to distribute, where can we find it documented?

Don't mind me. This was a stream of consciousness ramble.

Ah, that's RJ Mical

He co-designed the 3DO and Atari Lynx, plus was an OS guy for the Amiga (note that he did not design the Amiga hardware; that was Jay Miner). And now he's the lead tech guy at Fathammer.

Of course in this case it is debatable whether the best games for a system such as the iPaq should be hardcore 3D. If you take that route, then 98% of the processor time immediately goes out the window.

In Flight Entertainment - Win CE vs. XBox Games

I hope we see some good game development. I'm working on my employer's next generation in flight entertainment system and we need better games for the passengers to play. It's depressing that all the serious development of late has been for higher end systems - we're running a 266MHz embedded x86 at the seat under Win CE and there's little to choose from out there.

Although I'd like to rejoice at this news, I fear it won't help us much. With M$ pouring resources into XP and Xbox, I fear that CE (with its very reasonable liscencing terms) will become yet another orphaned child from Redmond.

Quake on the iPaq

Well, I just upgraded my iPaq to the unstable version of qpe, a GUI built over qt embeded for iPaqs with a basic Familiar Linux, and believe it or not it has QUAKE.

man, this quake thing is quickly becoming omnipresent, some more time and we'll have more ports of quake than space invader or pac man...

Oh, boy!

Now if they could only port Rune to the ipaq... imagine the possibilities!

On the topic of small demos...

Speaking of small demos, there is an execellent, high quality 11 minute 64 kb pc demo called the product [theproduct.de]. (sorry, windows only, DX 8 required).

Only problem...

We know no one wants to play a platform game with a pen, so obviously the next hack will be a joystick - but this begs the question:

How the fsck do you hold the iPaq AND a joystick at the same time?!

*clunk*
"Shit... dropped the joystick again."
(repeat 3x)

"Okay, maybe if I hold it like *this*."
*clunk* *crackle*
"SHIT!!#$!@@@@@%!^^@"

Old Commodore Computers

From the article: These are old Commodore and Amiga-programmers that know the virtues of small-is-beautifull.
For their time, nothing comes close to Commodore computers, the C64 sold 22 million units between 1981 and 1987. I started out with a C128 (I rarely ran C128 programs, instead I almost always ran it in C64 mode) and migrated to the Amiga's in 1989. I started out with an Amiga 500 and moved up to the A1200. Those machines were way ahead of their time, they were multimedia machines before the phrase was coined.
They had 4 channel digital stereo sound, could display 4096 colors out of a palette of 16 million onscreen at 1 time (this was when 16 color EGA was the rage on PC Clones). They had a fully multitasking operating system, and it was completely GUI orientated. They were also plug and play too, but they called it auto-detecting the hardware. I own a PC now, but at the time I'm glad I was an Amiga user instead of a PC user, I never had to go through all the troubles PC users were plagued with at the time (remember setting jumpers for ALL your hardware, and praying there were no conflicts?).

Re:Old Commodore Computers

it was completely GUI orientated.

Well, v2.0+ also had system-wide ARexx scripting, a powerful shell, user-space filesystem drivers/translators so you could install a driver to let you cd into compressed files, the window system itself, etc. The entire GNU command-line toolset was also ported to it via a compatibility library called ixemul. The OS was built on a message-passing-by-reference system, which meant that IPC was zero-copy. There was also a very powerful networking add-on called Envoy that provided network-transparent messaging services.
It also had fun late-binding shared libraries, that could be patched dynamically at run-time on a per-function basis, allowing third party hacks to theme the GUI and tune the OS on the fly.

So, it had a kick-ass GUI, but it was good at lots of other stuff too. :-)

Where the OS fell down was its complete lack of true memory protection - at the time however, this had some advantage, since it meant the computers could be made with cheaper MMU-less CPUs, and meant that task-switching was extremely quick. Amiga applications tended to be naturally multi-threaded with non-modal GUIs, so fast task-switching was a definite plus.

Interestingly, there's a re-creation of AmigaOS for x86 available here [aros.org]. It's actually coming along very nicely, but has all of AmigaOS's weaknesses, as well as its strengths - e.g. no memory protection, but ultra-fast reboots for when you do crash :-) (a soft "reboot" actually just vectors back into the kernel entry point, skipping the BIOS and bring the back system up in seconds.)

3d on the iPAQ, Pocket PCs...

Inmar Software ( http://www.inmarsoftware.com/ ) has a similarily optimized 3d engine for the Pocket PC. It has a game ( http://www.inmarsoftware.com/minigolf.htm ) that runs on StrongARM Pocket PCs and uses this impressive 3d engine. With 128 MB CF cards costing only $50 and 64 MB RAM in many new Pocket PCs, storage is not much of an issue, compared to other PDAs. The new Pocket PCs (running Pocket PC 2002, http://www.pocketpc.com/ ) all use the StrongARM cpu, so these sort of 3d games will become more common place and of higher quality in Pocket PCs with the powerful StrongARM as the cpu. The new PPC 2002 devices do not have a problem with multi-button pressing, so the quality of gaming on them will continue to advance. (The iPAQ 3635 only costs $300 after looking for a good deal and getting the $150 rebate from Compaq. I just ordered mine.)

All well and good but...

I think there are a lot of gamers out there with Ipaqs who don't want extraneous 3-D graphics and action games. What is wrong with games that would be more suited to the platform. Like strategy (No, RTS is not real strategy) or RPGS?

http://members.fortunecity.com/broadsword/Computer /FreeCiv/FreeCivScreenshots.html

Somebody started working on a freeciv port, but I think it has been abandoned. Thats too bad. I can't think of many games more suited to the Ipaq than Civ.

Anyhow.. I just think all this Ipaq gaming development is going in the wrong direction. Someone should port dos to this thing (with VGA support) then we could play all kinds of good non 3d games at 320x200.

A download of the demo

Here's a download of the demo:

http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=985&page=3 [infosync.no]

It's pretty cool!

I just bought an E115....

I thought "131mhz, should be enough for those gameboy and NES (heck even C64) emulators...

God I got a bad surprise... not only it's unplayable, I can't beleive it's tight-assembly code, either the microsoft compiler is really really crappy for MIPS device, or WinCE sucks too much ressources, or both of these reasons... The device isn't intended for gameplay, that I can understand, but heck, at 300$ a pop, (400-500$ for ipaq?) they might as well throw in just about every features they could.

I know that the processor in the E-115 is a crippled MIPS R3000/4000 without the FPU and some other "useless and current consuming" core components. I can overclock it but it still won't change de fact that I feel some application would greatly improve with simple lowlevel optimization.

All that said, It's nice to see some people coding low-level and pushing the envelope... Maybe they should work on pocketquake so I can get more than 1fps :)

My Ipaq

I use my Ipaq for everything. I use it's calculator function.
I sometimes calculate how my peers on slashdot will mark my post as "redundant" when it was never said in the first place.

I sometimes calculate how much more karma I need to boost my ego.

I sometimes calculate how much time it will take me to meta-mod these "meanie-heads," (remember, when posting use "school language") who moderate good posts as "troll," as unfair.

I am calculating right now how long it will take people to mark this comment as "troll" or "flamebait"

I also use the calendar function, but I shouldn't make my post to long. (remember, 20-40 lines)

-skoobasteve

Joystick!

A joystick is totally possible with the iPaq. It's 'ActiveSync' port just a glorified serial port. It shouldn't be hard to splice an old serial joystick to an activesync cable. Compile a new kernel and shazamm!

Not to be a curmudgeon. . .

but if I want handheld gaming goodness, I'll stick with a $100 Gameboy Advance. If I'm feeling frisky maybe a WonderSwan.

If I want a PIM, I'll get a $100 Palm platform device. If I want a Super PIM capable of holding a few extras, I'll get a $200 Palm platform device.

Either way, I still have $200-$300 to spend on my next-gen home console.

I applaud the hacker ethic at work here, but to be pragmatic I think there are better tools to do my job.

The Value...

The value of this article is not that a bunch of people have built 3D games for the iPAQ or other small devices.. The value of this article is that these people were able to create extremely clean and compact code. This is critical in developing good software

It just bugs me sometimes the number of lazy programmers that are out there. In one company that I have worked at, there was always a push towards getting it done rather than writing clean code. In one instance, one piece of software made 10 SQL queries that could have been done with 1. The reasoning for this was that, "the servers can handle it."

Remember guys as you go out there and develop code, although "the servers can handle it now.." at one point in the future, software is going to reach the capacity of the hardware. At that point, all the people that have been creating sloppy code will suffer.

Lara Croft on the iPAQ!

I was at Eidos headquarters about two months ago and they showed me Tomb Raider on iPaq. I was blown away. (And trust me, I've seen/played a lot of video games.) The quality (FPS, etc.) was better than the original PSX.

As someone already commented, the controls were... interesting... but nothing that you couldn't get used to after a little bit of practice.

Anyway, for anyone who cares, here is a link I saw about iPAQ TR:

http://www.pocketgamer.org/archives/00000314.sht ml

Small?

It's got a 200Mhz processor with 32Mb RAM, for feck's sake!

Physically small, yes - but it's got about the same power as a good PC did 5 years ago...

Re:why the tuning and tweaking?

The problems may arise on screen updates -- and that many of these games are bloatware. Game programmers don't think in terms of "K" anymore -- more like 100's of megs or even gigs. Try fitting a playable game (around 50 megs or so) on to an iPAQ.

-jhon

Re:A bit OT but...

Yes, you can on the 3800 series.

Re:A bit OT but...

Ah well finally Quake on it might not be 100% dumb :)
Well...I still wouldn't play it after all, but I guess I'd love a good racing game on my PDA..

Re:They don't have to try too hard...

With even the slightest effort, at least the games will look better than a GameBoy Advance!

And at over four times the cost for the hardware.

Re:Runs on Linux

Woohoo! No, I didn't notice the Linux mention. It must have been on page 2, which I avoid reading on Wired because their frame-breaking code messes up my read-daily-sites frame. I'll go read it again. My iPAQ runs Linux..although I haven't loaded any games in it yet.