February 14th 2010 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger
As we already know, Palm is set to present at the Game Developers Conference in sunny San Francisco next month, talking about the future of gaming on its webOS platform and releasing the PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) in beta form to the masses. This is exciting stuff, to be sure, but it should be noted that developers from the WebOS Internals group have been bringing us binary-coded games for some time now, even before the PDK was a twinkle in our eyes.
This means two things. First, that developers interested in writing their own binary based applications or porting others over to webOS don’t have to wait for the official PDK to become available to start coding. The WebOS Internals PDK, using the same underlying technology as Palm’s PDK, enables developers to port games now and get a head-start on development against the official Palm PDK.
Second, that there’s a laundry list of great (and free!) emulators and games available through Preware and WebOS Quick Install thanks to their hard work, including but not limited to:
This is all in addition to the myriad of patches, tweaks, and other enhancements made possible by the team. If you dig their work, don’t be afraid to hit that donate button.
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January 3rd 2010 | Posted by
Jonathan I Ezor
What a difference a day makes. As of yesterday, the biggest recent news from the webOS Internals global team was the launch of Doom and a video of a non-playable version of Quake. Today, there are three new announcements from webOS Internals:
First, Quake is now playable, with keymaps developed with help from user Jack87. As with the updated Doom, Quake launches through an icon rather than needing any typed commands in Terminal. The more complicated movements make Quake a bit more challenging to maneuver, but movement and sound work quite well. Both Quake and Doom are available via Preware.
Second, on the webOSInternals YouTube channel, the team has posted a video of a demo OpenGL application (a triangle containing moving concentric circles) by bpadalino, further proof that Palm has enabled this graphic functionality in webOS 1.3.5, and hinting at upcoming gaming possibilities that are even further confirmed by…
The third announcement, via Rod Whitby’s PreCentral forum post this morning where he details his discovery of a method for installing and running native Linux applications without the need for add-on services like webOSInternals’ own Upstart Manager Service. Rod points out that the ability to launch native Linux apps within webOS has implications well beyond gaming, in terms of advanced homebrew application development beyond that enabled by Palm’s current SDK. (PalmInfocenter posted a simpler explanation of what Rod and his colleagues discovered here.)
Palm’s CES 2010 event is scheduled for this coming Thursday, and based on what the webOSInternals folks are discovering literally every day, 2010 looks to be a very exciting time both for webOS developers and for the users who have benefitted from their innovation.
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