VisorCentral.com - Why cant Palms have good Graphics?

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Posted by robert sibell on 11-30-2001 05:34 PM:

Why cant Palms have good Graphics?

Almost every PPC game or something has beautiful graphics, real 3d objects, not just lines. Then i look at Palm games and such, and they look like dirt. Is there something that PPC developers are gifted with that let them program great graphics? Or does the PPC have a better graphics chip and proccessor?

To me, that is the biggest drawback to owning a limited palm. It cant be tooo hard for sony to create a faster proccessor using the same format, could it?

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Posted by GSR13 on 11-30-2001 06:10 PM:

The limitation is in the Processor. The fastest Palm Processor to date is a 33MHZ Dragonball VZ processor. While a 66MHZ processor has been announced, it is still nothing compared to the PPC processors.

In fact, Microsoft has forced PPC Device manufacturers to use the StrongARM processor, which runs at 206MHZ and is 32Bit.

Rumor is, the next generation PalmOS devices running PalmOS 5 will also be built around the StrongARM processor.

In my opinion, the developers for PalmOS have done an awesome job, considering the Palm Devices limitation in this arena. In addition, they have also continued to make great apps that take up little space and system resources.

I am sure that the graphics will come, but the hardware will have to get better.

**As an aside, I just realized you and I registered at the same time and have approximately the same number of posts. That's weird.

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Posted by robert sibell on 11-30-2001 09:54 PM:

Very, Very weird, SPoooKY!

Ok, So what you mean is that if palm had faster processors, graphics and games would be better. That the ONLY thing holding developers back is the processor?

Posted by homer on 11-30-2001 10:13 PM:

quote:
That the ONLY thing holding developers back is the processor?

Well, that and the low-resolution screens. Though that's slowly changing.

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Posted by carguy on 11-30-2001 10:50 PM:

I have to admit that I haven't played any PPC games, but there are a few games for PalmOS that have good graphics. The one that comes to mind is 3D Star Fighter Pilot from 3DAGames. Also, Bejeweled by Astraware and some of Aaron Aridiri's games have good graphics. I agree that Palm developers have done a wonderful job with what they have to work with. I am somewhat worried that future Palm's will stray from the original formula too much by switching to faster processors, etc. I hope battery life and size don't suffer when Palm swithches to ARM based processors.

Posted by Techie2000 on 12-01-2001 12:19 AM:

this any good?

http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=1123

Posted by dkessler on 12-01-2001 01:02 AM:

quote:
Originally posted by GSR13
The limitation is in the Processor. The fastest Palm Processor to date is a 33MHZ Dragonball VZ processor. While a 66MHZ processor has been announced, it is still nothing compared to the PPC processors.

In fact, Microsoft has forced PPC Device manufacturers to use the StrongARM processor, which runs at 206MHZ and is 32Bit.

There's a lot more to it than just the CPU. The Dragonball is also a 32-bit CPU and though it runs at a lower clock speed, it's a CISC processor (StrongARM is RISC) and can do a lot more with each instruction that it executes. A 33MHz Dragonball is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a 120MHz StrongARM in terms of processing power.

A much bigger limitation for PalmOS game developers is the lack of decent graphics support in past versions of the OS. The PalmOS has always been designed for doing text and buttons instead of game style bitmapped graphics. Doing game work usually means bypassing some (or all) of the OS and then developers have to deal with the differences between all the different types of PalmOS hardware and all the different versions of the OS.

Now, on top of that, throw in a severe lack of dynamic RAM. Games need lots of temporary RAM to build bitmaps and keep track of rapidly changing data. A single 160x160x16-bit color screen takes about 50KB. I just checked my Prism and with nothing running but the launcher, I only have about 200KB of dynamic RAM free. It would take half of that just to double buffer the screen. That doesn't leave a lot to work with.

Last but not least, Palm devices used to occupy a much lower price segment than the PPCs (and on average still do). To some extent that limits what software developers can charge for apps. Writing games takes a lot of man hours. Given the difficulty of writing PalmOS games, if you know that a game you can sell for $25 on the Palm could just as easily sell for $35 on PPC, which platform would you target?

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Posted by PastaGrrrl on 12-01-2001 03:40 AM:

Isn't it just the nature of the beast? - so to speak?
I mean, a lot of what I think people like about the Palm Platform as opposed to PocketPC is that Palm is simpler - plain and, well, simple. Thus, the less powerful processors, screens with lower resolutions etc., etc., The reason I chose something with a Palm Platform over a PocketPC is that I didn't want to feel as though I were sitting at my computer all day. I mean gosh... looking at the same or similar operating system, I would feel like I never left my office. Am I anywhere on the right track here?

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Posted by volcanopele on 12-01-2001 04:24 AM:

quote:
Originally posted by dkessler

if you know that a game you can sell for $25 on the Palm could just as easily sell for $35 on PPC, which platform would you target?

I would still target the Palm OS platform. True you can sell your product at $35 dollars for the PPC, but the Palm OS handhelds make up about 70-80% of the market. So potentially you could sell 3-4 times as many copies. Let say for example you have a pretty good selling game, say 10,000 copies on Palmgear. You make around 250,000 dollars based on your prices. The equivalent PPC program may sell only 3000 copies, making 100,000 dollars.

So again, based on market share, I would go with Palm OS.

Jason

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Posted by robert sibell on 12-01-2001 07:57 AM:

thats still 2 times more than what my parents make a year put together!

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