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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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"
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
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.
Oh cool Warfare Inc, that's quite the impressive game! Definitely remember that, it gets mentioned on the PalmDB discord quite often.
I remember it well - thank you!
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
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.
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.
Oh my god, I had completely forgotten about that one until now.
Perfect! A great game to play on the fisher price Pixter:
https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856
(Dmitry is something else)
Love seeing modern development on legacy platforms. Seems like there is a toolchain for almost everything being maintained by some hero somewhere.
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).
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!
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.
I know, right!? I have fond memories of my communicator.
Insaniquarium was wild!
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
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...)
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.
There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for supporting monochrome OS 3.5! Will be taking this for a spin. :)
I got memory error once enemy ship received second torpedo when played your game in browser :)
Nice. It might struggle on my Palm IIIx, but I shall resurrect my Tungsten E2 as it will now have a purpose again!
If you don't have a Palm:
https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS
https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ is a great option too (works in the browser, but even better as a PWA on iOS/Android).
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.
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.