dear all,
Is it possible to develop 3D content for handheld PDA's?
I know that I have seen a version of Quake for a pda, but I don't know if it uses dirextx,
or something else. My program is only 4.5Mb. Is this at all
possible in any way?
Cheers ,Shawnus
It's possible but you'll be writing your own 3D engine from scratch.
Consider that a Palm is basically the equivalent of an Amiga 2000 minus the specialist 2D hardware (or better for recent models) while an iPaq has the grunt of an early pentium -- there's no reason you can't run 3D code on them.
Quake was presumably a pretty easy port since it has its own OpenGL implementation to fall back on for graphics and is written for cross-platform. (DOOM was ported to run on character-mapped terminals by some maniac.)
Thanks podperson. I've just heard that ati have released a 3d engine for mobile phones, I guess this would work for pda's. I thought windows ce had some kind of directx, but I did not know that it diddn't extend to 3d graphics.
Cheers Shawnus
Check out www.tapwave.com and www.fathammer.com - you will find that ati has created a video card that pushes better than playstation 1 graphics on a pda for the palm OS - and fathammer is a 3d engine for that and other mobile devices - the result - better than quake 1 open gl graphics on a true handheld pda system meant for gaming (complete with analog joystick and buttons like a standard joystick / gamepad)
The only problem is you must know c++ to do any work in fathammer (not to mention purchase a license that I assume is hefty at best).
I would LOVE to use something like Blitz to create games for PDA's.
The only other PDA game engine I know of (beside GAPI, ZOT and other more 2D sprite based engines) is that of Jamagic - it has a Pocket PC 2002 project that you must buy separately and that is supposed to work.
Now before you get all excited, I purchased Jamagic and the Pocket PC 2002 port - no real examples, no tutorials, no support and a product that, over 6 months later, I have NO IDEA how to use. I can program easily in Blitz3D, Dark Basic Pro, VB6 and Studio and other languages, so I am no dummy. The examples in Jamagic are not very impressive and there is no manual and no one to help you - hence - a total waste of $150.00
Mike Felker