The Null Device

In 2001, a chap by the name of Aaron Ardiri wrote a port of Lemmings to the PalmOS PDA platform. Now, he has given himself 36 hours to port it to two modern mobile platforms, the iPhone and Palm webOS, with OSX and Windows desktop ports for good measure. Ardiri posted his progress, and interim OSX binaries, to a liveblog here; it seems to be down, but there's a long, scroll-like screenshot of the whole thing here. It's quite interesting, in its descriptions of how coding practices have changed as platforms have become less cramped, and of the process of adapting 2001-vintage PalmOS code to larger (mostly UNIX-based) systems.

Ardiri is considering adding another port to Android; I imagine this would involve some means of translating ancient, low-level C code into Java (or else a C compiler that produces Dalvik bytecode). If he's just dealing in C-based platforms, he could add Nokia's various platforms and (from what I hear) Samsung's new "Bada" OS, though whether there'd be much reason to bother is an open question.

¶ iphone lemmings osx palm palmos programming retrocomputing software tech webos 0

Some hackers have found a Palm Pre firmware image in a recovery tool and started looking around in it, examining the system. It is, as expected, a fairly standard-looking Linux system, with the full complement of command-line tools (not that you can access them from the GUI), and a lot of hackable low-level settings. Also in the ROM: a JVM, icons for other application types, and some settings in configuration files which hint at other Palm WebOS devices in the pipeline (including one codenamed "Zepfloyd"). In general, it looks fairly elegant. There's a long discussion thread, containing discoveries in the ROM image, here

¶ palm pre tech webos 0