Palm Pre Runs PRBoom

[mewse]

An enterprising Palm Pre hacker by the name of Sargun has gotten the PRBoom codebase to run successfully on the newly available device. There is a YouTube video embedded in his blog post showing the Pre running the port with Freedoom resources.

[Kaiser]

Impressive. I wonder how much memory that thing can hold.

[Whoo]

Interesting. Seems like a lot of work, though I'm not sure if I'd like playing Doom with such small buttons.

[fraggle]

Nice, but to be honest it's not that incredible considering it's basically just a Linux device.

[destx]

fraggle said:

Nice, but to be honest it's not that incredible considering it's basically just a Linux device.

It does say something about the Pre though. A lot of people were afraid that it would never do anything particularly interesting (games) without huge amounts of work. All I ever heard about development is that it would be easy but you'd only have access to javascript and html 5.

That's one of the reasons I didn't get excited about this platform, but seeing that someone can get Doom up and running on it after only a week makes me more interested in it.

[destx]

Blerk, double post.

[exp(x)]

I got Doom running under Linux on an OMAP3 ARM Cortex A8 before they did.

[Super Jamie]

Looks alot smoother than the Android port. Buttons would be better than touch, though does the Pre have some sort of trackball to do WASD style controlling?

[david_a]

destx said:

It does say something about the Pre though. A lot of people were afraid that it would never do anything particularly interesting (games) without huge amounts of work. All I ever heard about development is that it would be easy but you'd only have access to javascript and html 5.

I don't think he is going through the official SDK to do this. It looks like he's programming against the underlying components available on the OS, not the public API you're supposed to use.

As far as I know the public API is still the javascript/html thing, but I haven't really been paying attention. Can somebody confirm this?

[chungy]

well it's based on Linux, so it's conceivable that you're allowed to replace the firmware/OS entirely and do whatever you want. (This isn't necessarily true; the GNU GPLv2 has a loophole commonly known as "TiVoization", named after TiVo which runs Linux but disallows people from putting their own version of the OS on the device; the GNU GPLv3 removes the loophole, although unfortunately, Linux (the kernel only; most of the GNU components commonly used are using GPLv3 now) is still only using GPLv2, so Palm could be exploiting the same loophole.)

[RestlessRodent]

He just installed Debian in a chroot environment and basically used that.

[Super Jamie]

That's not very exciting. A debootstrapped framebuffer and SDL libs can play PrBoom. Can't make any phonecalls or browse the web or use wifi or whatever, but it plays Doom :P