Gaming Never Felt So Good


Some of the more complex arcade and action games can be a real pain to play on the Palm. It can be nearly impossible to press the Palm hardware buttons fast enough or in the right sequence for rapid fire shooting and movement. Using the address/todo or datebook/memo buttons to go left and right in conjunction with up and down is anything but natural.

Help is finally here. World Wide Widget Works recently started selling the Palm GamePad. The Palm GamePad fits snugly into the hotsync port of any III-style Palm and provides Gameboy-like controls.

The gamepad supports two modes - an "all games" mode which allows you to use the gamepad with any game on your Palm and "GamePad aware" mode for games that directly use the GamePad APIs. This is needed at the moment because for now you cannot hotsync or use IR when in "all games" mode. This restriction should be removed in the future.

I recently acquired a gamepad and gave it a whirl. I first tried it on my PalmPilot Professional with a Palm III memory card running OS 3.02. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work with the PPPro. I had expected it to work since the PPPro uses the same serial port as the Palm III and the card was equivalent to a III but it wouldn't cooperate.

I gave up and tried the gamepad on my Palm III. The III immediately detected the gamepad. Definitely a good start. But when I tried to play Zap 2000, a game known to work with a Palm GamePad it didn't work. Then I tried Gobble, a Pacman clone I have a hard time playing with the hardware buttons. It didn't work either. I was beginning to think I'd gotten a defective unit.

Then I tried the Asteroids clone Reptoids. I like Asteroids - Maelstrom is one of my favorite Mac games - but I cannot play it using the hardware buttons. Reptoids worked beautifully with the gamepad. It was incredibly easy to spin and shoot rapidly at the same time. I cannot do that with the hardware buttons no matter how hard I try.

I then tried Xonix, a Qix-like game with multiple balls instead of a moving string. Xonix sort of worked. I could move up and down and select my guy to move into the playing area but I couldn't move left or right. I looked for some way to remap the buttons to move left and right but I couldn't.

The copyright of the article Gaming Never Felt So Good in Palm Computing Devices is owned by Janice Karin. Permission to republish Gaming Never Felt So Good in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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