This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I’m excited to announce that it’s ready to be released to the public!
↫ Captain’s Quarters
The game in question is a top-down minigolf game, and works on devices running Palm OS 3.5 and higher, in both monochrome and colour, and there’s high-resolution support for devices running Palm OS 5.0 and higher. Sadly, my own Palm OS devices were all drained of battery so I couldn’t quickly load it up and play it on real hardware in time for this post (rest assured, my T|X is currently charging), but you can play it in your browser if you want to. Like any other top-down minigolf game, it’s simple and fun to play.
The game’s creator, whose real name I can’t find so I’ll just refer to them by their blog’s name Captain’s Quarters, also wrote a published a post about the process of developing a Palm OS game in 2024. Especially the section on what is needed to code for Palm OS today is important if you’re also interested in picking this up.
The best news is that developing a Palm OS game can be done on modern hardware, that saves me a lot of time not having to deal with virtual machines or having to set up an old PC running Linux.
For getting a working compiler, I used prc-tools-remix, which is the same old compiler as in the old days, but it’s updated to work on a modern day Linux or OS X system.
↫ Captain’s Quarters
People in general are often oblivious to just how advanced and capable both Palm OS and Windows PocketPC PDAs really were – most people never had one – and even more people are oblivious to just how vibrant the gaming scene on Palm OS was. My Palm OS devices were some of the best gaming handhelds I’ve ever had, and my love for jewel-matching games still goes strong today on Android, but it all started on Palm OS, the original mobile home of the original Bejeweled. Palm OS games got me through quite a few boring lectures and classes in university.