New Pre Classic emulator video shows off 3D gaming prowess
By Ross Miller 
posted April 19th 2009 4:01AM
posted April 19th 2009 4:01AM
posted April 19th 2009 4:01AM
HP Pre 3
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My sister has trouble using the iPhone with her nails, so maybe they just aren't compatible with capacitive touch screens.
Of course they aren't, capacitive touch technology works off the skin's capacity to hold electrical charge, something keratin can't do.
Monster Cable still sucks.
Why is everyone copying Saad Rabia's comment now?
We're not copying his comment. It was the idea of many commenters on a post (http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/17/engadget-endorses-monster-cable-uh-hell-no/).
mgsrocks1: because Monster Cable sucks.
EPIC FAIL!
So... I have to emulate the old palm for a 3d game... using "virtual" keys on a touch device? they are out of mind???
Umm no, this is just to show that you can emulate the old Palm Pre games, no doubt the Palm Pre will have many of it's own being based on some of the commonest web standards.
It emulates the interface of old Palm OS devices... what _should_ it use?
Unless you want to reprogram every application to work with the Pre interface?
I wonder if this is the same lady in those crazy women drivers video on YouTube
Phones should get a dedicated Joystick like a psp kind if thy really wanna attract gamers to there phones. No way you can play games touchin screens with your fingers all cramped like that. I say it should be like the PSP one and appear like a speaker.
They tried this. It was called the Nokia N-Gage, and it failed miserably.
This sucks and looks like absolute shit compared to the games that the app store offers to the iphone/ipod touch. I can't wait for this over hyped "iphone killer' to fade away and be done with (like the android platform). As for me, I think I'll be happy with my iphone 3g, and the 34,000 apps that are just a few multi-touch swipes away. Palm Pre = ultimate fail.
You do know the game was made for the old Palm OS, and was being emulated, right?
You did actually pay attention to the video?
As much as I dont care what your personal preference in tech is, part of me, because of their trolls, really hope for an Apple collapse this year.
But then again, where are your cool apps? The best games for iphone? They're casual games like you'd find on any other mobile OS like Bejeweled.
I'll give you ones like the Kindle one. I'm not saying the iphone doesn't have anything worthwhile. Just nothing mindblowing.
We're still waiting for COOL USEFUL apps like Slingbox, Docs to go, Hulu, etc. What's that? A crippled Skype app? Will Apple ever approve Slingbox? Will anyone else ever waste time to develop an iphone app that may rely on a 3G connection?
What's that saying about having 500 channels and nothing on? Here's the thing with apps. Apple may have 30k apps. But I use a handful at most. The usual casual game wasters, a few freebie apps like WSJ, Facebook, Kindle, Pandora, and maybe 1-3 other apps.
If i went to a Pre, I'd still use..guess what..a handful of apps. And I wouldn't have to worry about Slingbox, Hulu, etc being approved or not when they easily develop them for the Pre. In addition, the Pre is multitasking. Will come with Sprint Navigation. Has a real KB. Has much cheaper plans on Sprint and a faster network that won't cry about apps like Slingbox.
@ Cmil1212
and one thing to add, the nature of the OS means that you don't require Sprints/Palms go ahead on what to install, so even if Sprint doesn't like it and expels it from the App store or whatever, it will still be somewhere on the internet and available for downloading + installing.
... I don't get it, I really don't. You iPhone zealots regularly talk about how incredibly awesome your closed-garden app store is, while I sit here with my former Palm OS devices and current Windows Mobile device, go online, and find applications everywhere, to include even beta stuff or old prototypes that will never be finished yet are awesome in their current state. Furthermore, I can then make my own while being able to test them on my own device (and, at least in the case of my old PalmOS stuff, on a free emulator using the ROM files downloaded from my device. Haven't tried it for my Treo though) ...
Is the convenience of 'a few multi-touch swipes' inside a walled garden better than being able to get on any website from any Internet connection to download and install any application I want without having to run anything first while examining a large bevy of supporting materials for each application?
I sure hope Sprint and Palm go all out in approving all of the apps that were thrown by the waste side with the iPhone application dictatorship.
@ Look_Around_You
Keep dreaming of Apple's downfall you idiotic fanboy!
It's hilarious that people think the Pre can't compete with the iphone or the app store. The app store only came out in july last year, so it's up to 34000 in about 9 months. Why is it so hard to imagine that the palm store wouldn't be as big in 6 months with a huge catalog by the end of the year?
How many apps for the iphone are actually specific for the iphone? The Pre hardware matches anything the iphone has, so almost every app available for the iphone could be ported to the Pre. Touchscreen UI, accelerometer, gps, internet connectivity, etc. Pretty much every requirement for iphone apps are also on the Pre.
It will be interesting to see how quickly webOS version are developed. The emulator looks amazing and really sets up the Pre to have access to an already huge catalog of old palmOS apps. They may be dated but there are some incredibly useful ones already available.
Yeah, the same thing happens to me with the iPhone sometimes.
Shit, this was a reply for MrRoboto1990.
I am curious about the hack/homebrew efforts that will be put into the Pre at launch. After all, its linux. it shouldn't be hard to get some native c apps running on that thing. Some console emulators would quench the Pre gaming thirst. How can you do anything 3D with just CCS, HTML, and Javascript?
HTML5's tag can do it.
I'm not looking forward to HTML5 being common place on the internet. Hardware accelerated 3D in browsers, ugh.
When she presses 'accept' you can see that it changes colour every time. So it's not that she's touching it with her nail, the phone is actually registering the touch, the application isn't responding. Maybe it's a speacial feature of the phone. It wants to make sure you REALLY want to play the game before it lets you.
I love it how all the apple fanbois are treating iphone as if it was a gaming platform. Just 4-6 months ago, before all the games started showing, it was just a software platform, but fast forward to today and several apple commercials later and suddenly iphone is threatening the psp and nintendo ds. As long as iphone doesn't have dedicated controls it will *never* be a proper gaming platform. All the monkey balls in the world will not change that fact.
And I don't think that Pre can be considered a gaming platform either. What I do find impressive about the video above is the fact that an emulator is capable of running a 3D game. That tells me two things about the pre - 1) It's powerful hardware. I don't know if it's more powerful than iphone, but at the very least it's on the same level. 2) It's well written, efficient and powerful os. And given the fact that it has multitasking, and at least so far from what we've seen, the browser experience on the pre is actually superior the iphone, all this tells me that as long as the developers embrace the webos platform it has enormous potential - far more than current iphone os can ever hope for.
@wrabbit, I think the Pre has better hardware -- mainly due to the videos of the web loading content that were up a few weeks ago. They had both the Pre and the iPhone on Wifi loading a graphically intensive webpage... The pre loaded in 7 seconds while the iPhone took over 20 seconds to render everything.
I know it's not the end-all, be-all for performance, but in terms of web surfing and rendering graphics the Pre wins hands down.
Nothing brings out the iPhone fanboys like something on the Palm Pre.
Honestly, you guys seem very, very scared.
is it being scared? or is it the possibility that when they whip out their iphone and someone gets out their Pre, that they get shown up like a fat kid in a dance off...
The only thing that Irks me is they pussyfoot with all the videos. I understand its not out yet, but if they want people to buy it quit showin the "Card" Feature every single time and only 5 seconds of anything. Havent seen anything about the Camera,Texting, Recieving a Call, anything like that only shit like the browser. Look, the phone isnt out for sale yet, so why are they scared to show all the features on a video, not just the things they "feel safe" showing you
Wait and see, there will be an iPhone emulator for the Pre as well.
VERY unlikely. MotionApps, who developed the Classic emulator, got special access to the inner workings of the Linux OS, much more, we're led to believe, than the advanced Javascript calls, however deep they go, do.
As long as I can do SlingPlayer in either WebOS or Classic i'll be happy
The emulator can't access the internet or any other radio from what I've heard. So it'll have to be via WebOS and unlikely to be available at launch.
Oops, I got that wrong. Apps within the Classic emulator CAN access the internet.
Check out Motion Apps blog for the info.
I hate to be the one to point it out, but that's a very old game that's rendered in multi angle sprites. It used to run just as fine on my Palm Zire 72, a palm that's quite a few years old, it's just a bit of creative graphical trickery, not really high end hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
Yes, but this is emulation.
The Pre can't natively run 68K code written for old Palms. Every machine code instruction has to be translated for the new CPU first. The fact that Classic can run some PalmOS apps as fast as a Centro (and some will be faster) is amazing. Emulation is difficult. To put this in perspective, it took 20 years for PC emulation of the Commodore Amiga to reach full speed. The Amiga came out in 1984 and ran at 7.14Mhz. Recent Treos ran an Arm architecture at, what, 312Mhz or something?
The Pre is boasting some very capable hardware. I hope that it gets a native SDK some time soon. It's clearly possible for native apps to be written as Classic MUST be native, but I'm guessing it was authored only under tight supervision and approval from Palm to ensure that it doesn't make the platform unstable. It's the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps Palm can encourage a handful of top tier trusted developers and give them full native access? We'd get some kick-ass games then.
As a Blackberry and iPod touch user with previous ownership of Windows Mobile, PalmOS and Symbian devices, I must say that the Pre is the most exciting device I've seen in years.
All of the people that keep saying, "How is the Pre going to pull developers away from the iPhone", really crack me up.
It is not like you can only develop for one platform. There is no contract you have to sign that says, "If you develop for the iPhone, you cannot develop for the Palm Pre." Most independent developers that try to develop apps for a career or at least some source of income will probably port many games over to the Pre to make more money.
I currently develop apps for the iPhone, and I don't even own an iPhone. To be honest, if Verizon had an iPhone, I probably would not buy it (I need a physical keyboard). I develop apps because a.) I like developing software, b.) It's fun working on small projects with some friends, and c.) You make money.
If all I have to do is learn a new API, and re-write the code using this new API and programming language, it won't take very long to port over the applications.
@krische
I'm not an American citizen, so Sprint GPS app very likely won't have maps that Garmin already has. That's why I'm asking. It's questionable if emulator would get direct access to gps hardware of the Pre.
The problem being that the PalmOS emulator will probably be faster for games than the actual WebOS because of the javascript dev limitation..
I love everything I've seen about the Pre, and plan on getting one when it's released. Yet, I don't see how this shows it gaming potential, I use to have this exact game on my Zire 72.
Well this is very interesting - you cannot be bringing out devices these days with just a webOS, you need proper real games (and all the other apps that require proper SDK access). So it is good to see that the Pre will have them, otherwise it's ability to claim "contender" status would need to be reviewed.
But I hope for Pre owners that GTS World Racing turns out to be a much better game than it was on the iPhone - the App Store version was extremely boring, the graphics were ho-hum, you would rarely see any other racers, and the impression of speed was sorely lacking.
you know what i learned from this video.... girls cant drive
jk.