Hello, does anyone have some numbers or know about the Palm & Windows CE games market? Is it worth to make games for it? If you want to make a Palm & Windows CE game for my company contact me please (royalties + small advance possible). Take care, Jester

What I expected. Nobody knows about the Windows CE market. So lets change the question:

Why have you never attempted to break into this market? Do you believe it doesn''t pay? Too much work?

It''s probably more like "let''s wait and see if anyone makes money on this before we jump in."

Also, everyone *everyone* I know has some sort of Palm OS device, and I''ve never even seen a Windows CE machine except for in Circuit City.

It''s probably too bad too, my guess is DirectX games are pretty easy to port to a CE device.

-M

Personally, WindowsCE and the Linux-X-Server driven PDA''s annoy me. PocketCPUs, etc. Why? Interface.

Nothing more annoying than trying to use Windows on a tiny screen with a stylus.

Palm is successful because it''s a market leader and because it''s OS and applications are designed around it''s size and input limitation.

I''ve played color Breakout on my palm and some other simple games, so it''s not hard. I think the real point I''m trying to make is that it''s unlikely you''ll see mass acceptance of Quake on the Palm. =) The input and the output just don''t provide the same experience.

I think there''s a market for Palm or PocketPC games, but I suspect they''re for simple, short, non-involved games. (No one I know spends hours in front of their palm!). So, my question is do you really need DirectX or OpenGL to create PocketPc or Palm games? You can probably create games without that firepower. As for market potential, hard to say. I think most people aren''t upto paying much for Palm software, but I''ve seen some gamepaks for the Palm, so there''s definitely a market.

R>

My own opinion is that the handheld devices will soon become powerful enough to run a "normal" version of Windows. And when that happens, voila, my software and games will magically be available to those devices.

I expect this to happen in 2-3 years. So it''s hard to muster a lot of enthusiasm to bother.

DavidRM
Samu Games

quote: Original post by Torn Space
Also, everyone *everyone* I know has some sort of Palm OS device, and I''ve never even seen a Windows CE machine except for in Circuit City.

Be carefull generalizing things like this. While it might be true that everyone you have has a palm OS device, in other areas this is much different. I know a lot of people that have a PDA of some sort, and they all have Windows CE based machines (okay, except for one person who has one with it''s own OS, that was based on windows ce though)

I know that palm is probably a little more popular at the moment. It was the last time I check at least.

>My own opinion is that the handheld devices will soon become
>powerful enough to run a "normal" version of Windows. And when
>that happens, voila, my software and games will magically be
>available to those devices.

Ah yes, one day... one day...

Take the TabletPC for instance.

It's a little bigger than a PDA, but they'll be shrinking fast.




Edited by - Pyabo on December 11, 2001 7:03:09 PM

Uhh, unless I''m mistaken, PocketPCs have enough power to run Windows 9X already. They just don''t have the hard drive space. I mean, someone I know has a PocketPC with a 233MHz chip and 64MB RAM. That''s enough to run Windows, methinks. However, the onboard data storage space is really tiny, like maybe 100MB at most. If they up that (perhaps using the same hard drives that are in MP3 players nowadays?) then it''d be a viable gaming platform.

Interesting thread. Anonymouse (? - not really anonymous?) Poster has it right. Has anyone seen the new Apple iPod MP3 player? Size of a deck of cards with a 5GB hard drive. Doesn''t IBM now have a 1GB microdrive that is the size of a Compact Flash Type II card? I think the answer is yes (http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/micro/). The problem seems to be power, battery life. The same reason you don''t see GeForce 3 Ti 500 chips on ultra thin laptops. Yet.

On a related, but unrelated, has anyone year played with programming a Game Boy Advance? Lik-sang (www.lik-sang.com) has a Flash memory cartridge and there are free compilers, samples, and tools out there at a good many sites (www.gbadev.org). Could be great fun.

I''ll also just mention again here that NDL (www.ndl.com) and FatHammer (www.fathammer.com) have working 3D engine prototypes for powerful Pocket PC''s (high end Compaq iPaq for example). I''ve seen the NDL engine running, with a 2000 triangle textured, skinned character model dancing to some music at 10-15 frames per second. The dance floor was basically 1 rectangle (2 triangles), but had an animated texture. All running on a machine with no hardware floating point unit. Very cool.

Pocket games obviously require a different human computer interface and presentation than PC and console games. This is where there are opportunities to be innovative an creative.

Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

We may see a Transmeta processor at 500+ MHz, Windows XP, and a 1 GB IBM Microdrive in the Palm PCs of the future...

Palm OS is sleek and you can run Joust on a Visor Prizm. I play several very enjoyable games on my Palm IIIx. I know several people you love the iPaq. Both Palm and CE have a good size user base.

Want to make a handheld game I say go for it. I think that is what the people who made Diakatana are doing now.



Glen Martin
Dynamic Adventures Inc.
Zenfar