A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games.

Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal.

When she asked how long it would take to even get started, I estimated about 18 months to learn C++ properly, another six months to learn Microsoft foundation classes. The six months after that to learn the windows API if she worked really hard at it. At the time I thought maybe there was a place in the Windows game market for a mini golf game.

She took less than a week to create a working, bug-free prototype, but then lost interest.

I hate people like that! Everything takes forever for me to learn.

Luckily she blessed me with a passel of pretty much bug-free and absolutely hilarious children, so I’m giving her a pass.

Miniature golf was a game I began twice for the Macintosh back in the 1990's but never ended up completing/shipping.

I've just recently been trying to recover my nearly 35 year old sources and create disk images for use on an emulator. The first B&W attempt at MiniGolf is here: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-UnfinishedTa...

The second attempt (when I was a better programmer) was in color ... will make it on Volume 2. (I'm currently trying to put that disk image together.)

Amazing work, thank you!

I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia:

I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases...

Take Apotris, for example: I've bought (and probably will buy) a lot of official Tetris versions over the years, but here's an incredibly slick implementation I can play on all of my consoles, or even on any computer without installation (thanks to WASM-based GBA emulators like RetroArch Web and modern browsers having native gamepad support).

Besides that, there's just something comforting with having a single, self-contained executable that I know I can in all likelihood run one, ten, twenty years from now – which is probably not true for many iOS or even web indie games I otherwise really like.

Is there an app store for palm is, or somewhere you can browse different apps at least?

This is beautiful! And now I'm nostalgic for my IIIxe. Through the rose colored glasses of poor remembrance, that might've been peek productivity in a handheld. It had enough functionality to remember all the things I cared to have on my person at all times, but was utterly lacking in notifications about distractions. It took me a while to quiet my iPhone so that it's not always pestering the hell out of me, but Palm was opt-in. If you didn't tell it to tell you about something, it kept its mouth shut.

I wouldn't actually go back if I could, but part of me misses that.

I have the Original PalmPilot, hardware upgraded to 3.0, as part of a beta program. I also have a few Palm 3's. Is there a compiled PDB available?

It would be really cool if someone wrote something like WINE to allow running PalmOS applications on Android.

Wondering if I could run this on real hardware, I realized I have no idea what happened to my Palm LifeDrive when I changed to Blackberries. I miss that little chunky PDA. It was amazing for its time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeDrive

The post suggests getting a real device. Where the heck do you get a real device these days? Is there some retro hardware out there? An open source project where you send out a PCB order to Shenzhen?

You need to promote this to projectionists so they can play it on their IMAX systems.

I wrote code for PalmOS back around '99. One thing that stands out in my memory is the way that applications were tested. I think it was a feature of the emulator, which would fire events at your software. I forget the details, but if you could make, say, 1,000 events without crashing, it was passable, 10k was good, and 100k was excellent.

Well, I thought I was a reasonable competent C++ programmer and I was shocked at how quickly my application would crash using this tool. It was an extremely humbling experience that really opened my eyes. I often think of how effective that simple tool was at revealing bugs, but it's obviously not something that works in today's multitasking, Internet-connected devices.

The other thing I remember is CodeWarrior being the first IDE I used that had a drop-down box with all the functions in the current source file. That was a pretty big step forward in productivity.

Incidentally, I was still using a Palm Tungsten as late as 2010, when I was in Japan. There was a very simple Japanese dictionary application for Palm. Once you learn the basic rules for stroke order and direction, you could mimic any character you see using the stylus and do a dictionary search for matching Kanji. I was able to figure out a lot of navigation just by mimicking unknown Kanji that I saw on signs.

Looks great!

Have you considered adding a "ball dropping into the hole" animation? In the video, it looks like a new level is loaded as soon as the ball and the whole overlap to a sufficient degree. I think from a user's perspective, it would be much more satisfying to somehow see the ball go in. It would give you more of a sense of achievement before the next level is loaded.

What do you think?

I appreciate that you named the source directory `sauce` instead. It's the little things that matter.

As someone who interned at Palm, love this so much!

I love this and love the art design especially. Great job! The only thing I would change persoanlly is that i think it feels more natural to go in thge opposite direction with the mouse when you're aiming. Many mini golf games on Miniclip used to do it that way. Also if you're a fan of FOSS games i recommend Neverball and Neverput which is a 3d golf similator with nice graphics

I am not very familiar with Palm OS, but I do like the idea of a smart device that isn’t a full on smartphone. Something like the old Palm devices or the Pocket PCs from 25 years ago. Is there such a thing today? What gets closest?

Interesting project. I would say the issues had, memory leaks. debugging, etc are a lot more common in game dev than you might expect. Much of these problems have been abstracted away by game engines such as Unreal/Unity/Godot, but if you were to go into game dev with C, OpenGL, and a memory restriction (especially when hardware enforced), you might run into the same teething issues.

The level editor is a nice touch, I would be curious on the implementation as something in the same vein existed for the Tony Hawk series of games and was responsible for "Tony Hawks Pro StrCpy" https://icode4.coffee/?p=954 . Though jailbreaking and arbitrary code execution is probably a lot easier achieved via PalmOS than a minigolf side project.

Wow, I can't believe this! That looks awesome!

Once I got a Zire 31 with PalmOS for Christmas. It became quite a fun treasure hunt to find free games and software for it. And I say treasure hunt because it was like looking for gems among piles of garbage as far as I can remember.

I love it! Quick suggestion: allow a moment to show the ball dropping into the hole before loading the next level. It might be frustrating denying the player that satisfaction.

I have been using CloudPilot [1] to play a bunch of retro Palm games on iOS. It works reasonably well. Hopefully a native emulator will be released now allows emulators.

[1] https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/app-preview/#/tab/sessions

Great job! Just from the video I could tell this is fun. This is what games are supposed to be.

Amazing game, gives the same level of excitement (and frustration) as playing real mini golf. Thank you!

I miss bike or die. For a while it was on iOS but didn’t get updates. I had hours in that game.

This made me remember the Zany Golf bouncy burgers! The hours I spent there!

Ahh good memories. I wrote Pente for PalmOS back in 2004 or 2005, complete with a computer opponent using a minimax tree with alpha/beta pruning. Unfortunately I never finished or released it. It was so much fun to do early mobile development - it compared to nothing else I'd done at the time. And it wasn't easy. This is definitely an accomplishment.

For the Amiga, one of my favorite games was "Hole-in-one Miniature Golf."

The game is really fun when played in the browser-based emulator. I nearly got sucked into practice mode.

IMO: I'd love a port (or otherwise inspired by) version for Android / iOS / in-browser. It's really fun.

You should add a short celebration before loading the next level. The "Loading" text feels very abrupt, like you did something wrong.

Display something like the text "Nice!", and try to avoid covering the hole, so that the player can see the ball disappearing into the hole.

Wait just half a second before you show the loading dialog. You can probably skip the loading dialog entirely if it is as short as it looks like in the video.

Thanks for the memories. Good old times I was programming in SuperWaba for palmOS!

Having up and down slopes on the different holes would be an interesting and challenging addition.

This made me so happy. I'm going to go look for my Handspring Visor now...

This is really cool and brings back lots of memories. I've a curious question for the game devs among you. One of the things that makes put put fun is the possibility of a hole in one. How do you make sure this is actually possible in a game like this?

Great work! It's incredible to see projects like this still going in 2024.