I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia:
I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases...
Take Apotris, for example: I've bought (and probably will buy) a lot of official Tetris versions over the years, but here's an incredibly slick implementation I can play on all of my consoles, or even on any computer without installation (thanks to WASM-based GBA emulators like RetroArch Web and modern browsers having native gamepad support).
Besides that, there's just something comforting with having a single, self-contained executable that I know I can in all likelihood run one, ten, twenty years from now – which is probably not true for many iOS or even web indie games I otherwise really like.
Take all of this with a big grain of salt due to rosy retrospection, but I feel like a big appeal of Palm OS was that going online was an intentional activity (if possible at all; most of my handhelds had neither mobile data nor Wi-Fi).
As a result, it was completely distraction-free: I'd queue up news/articles (via Plucker), mail, and books for the day, HotSync in the morning/evening, and then that was it – no chance of any notification (other than pre-programmed local reminders/appointments) popping up and disrupting whatever I was doing.
Other than that, there was still more than enough to do ~forever: More Ebooks on a 64 MB MMC than I could reasonably read all summer, the top 100? 1000? Wikipedia articles, the CIA World Factbook as a PalmDoc, Space Trader... Ok, enough with the nostalgia :)
I really like the idea of getting my day's worth of emails in the morning and responding to them throughout the day while offline (using one of the great folding keyboards!). Hard to emulate that these days though. It feels artificial to put my phone in airplane mode or whatever.
I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS and other "retro" homebrew executable formats might have their actual practical uses these days, beyond the nostalgia:
I can run Palm OS .prcs, .gb homebrew ROM from itch.io etc. on my desktop, iOS, and Android, as well as on physical gaming devices; offline, efficiently, distraction-free, without any chance of in-app purchases...
Take Apotris, for example: I've bought (and probably will buy) a lot of official Tetris versions over the years, but here's an incredibly slick implementation I can play on all of my consoles, or even on any computer without installation (thanks to WASM-based GBA emulators like RetroArch Web and modern browsers having native gamepad support).
Besides that, there's just something comforting with having a single, self-contained executable that I know I can in all likelihood run one, ten, twenty years from now – which is probably not true for many iOS or even web indie games I otherwise really like.