Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Philip Gooch Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Cool Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:21:59 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 56 Message-ID: <37B91BA7.7B57BFCB@easynet.co.uk> References: <7p7e72$i8s22@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <7pa09v$htr2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.131.140.238 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en Toby Sargeant wrote: > On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 22:36:10 +0100, Nigel Critten wrote: > > >stuff) and with a £4.99 - £7.95 title there is no money for licensing Which > >pretty much leave the PC, Mac and budget games don't work on these machines, > >people would prefer to pay £35 as they think they are getting more for their > >money (which in many cases they are not) > > The user base for linux is beginning to become big enough for commercial > games support. Writing games for either Linux or BeOS is looking increasingly > interesting. While programming for the PSX is fun 'n all, and certainly takes > a number of us back to the good ol' days, the flexibility and power of a > PC and a decent OS just can't be beat. > > With good support for 3d acceleration nearly here, and sound support already > reasonably good, it's beginning to look like wintel might well be facing some > competition in the gaming area soon. What about Palmtops? PalmPilots and Psion's are just about ubiquitous now and there's already a number of quite decent shareware games out for these. Most sell for about £10 and people seem quite happy to pay this. Because of the relative lack of power in these machines most games are very 8/16 bit in style (having said that, the Psion 5mx is very powerful and someone has just written a very impressive 3D engine for it). The Psions are easy to program if you use the built in OPL language - although it's a BASIC variant games written in it can actually run at a decent speed. Also Psion have now made the C++ and OPL dev kits free. Java is also an option with the Psion 5. If assembler is your thing, this is an option for the Series 3 machines (there's a great book on programming the Psion machines - I've got it at home, I'll let you know the details if anyone's interested) I've heard that the PalmPilot is also quite easy to program and there are a number of options here too. Apparently you can program straight onto the machine in C or Forth with the relevant compilers. The Mac Pilot C SDK is free, and Metrowerks have got Codewarrior for Pilot. I don't know about WinCE but Visual Studio 6 will let you compile for it - but the problem here is that, as it typical with Wintel machines, what might run on one WinCE machine may well not run on another. At least with the Psions and Pilots you know that your program will definitely run on all of them. I had discussed this with a friend of mine and between us we've got two games on the go for the Psion 3 and 5. Progress is slow as we've both got day jobs but it's great fun. Cheers Phil