Greetings!

Well, well... it looks like I might throw myself into the remake
business also. I have avoided this before, for a simple reason: If one
were to realize AR today on a modern PC, you couldn't just settle with
a simple port (imo anyway), and there's no way you could beat Price at
his own game. So for me, an AR remake on a PC is pretty futile (unless
you could actually make a living out of it, since probably ALL free
time would have to be put into it).

And then there is/was the MUD. The reason I've halted the development
of the MUD was that the MUD interface is not widely appealing today.
Pherhaps it's not even appealing to everyone on the list, even though
it would be very cool to have such an online meeting place, just for
us. So, since it's ultimately for a relatively small audience, I
personally will not take the time to do it today.

But I still want to see an AR remake... even though I had no intentions
of doing one myself. That is, up until today.

I own a Palm device... it's of the old grayscale variant, but of
lately, there's been cropping up all sorts of games on it: Sim City, V-
Rally, Gameboy emulators, Tetris, Galaga and so on. And some of them
are rather good. I've even seen a realtime raycasting engine, much like
the AR one.

So, just for fun, I played around with some graphics on the Palm
screen, and found that the low resolution of the Atari, is horisontally
exactly the same as the Palm's. The vertical size is larger on the
Atari, so some pictures has to be cropped, and the text in AR uses a
high resolution mode, so the font won't be reuseable.

But, the point is: There is a market for old classic games on the Palm.
In fact, since the palm is so slow and small, classic games are the
only games that it can handle. However, it is more powerfull than the
original Atari 8-bit system (of course) so it can probably handle much
of the planned AR 16-bit features as well (automapping, multiple
monsters, and so on).

So, those of you who can't program, can stop reading now (since I won't
give a time-frame for this... the Palm platform will survive for
atleast two more years, before Internet Pads take over).

However, amongst those who can program, do we have any Palm developers
on the list?

If so, here's what I'm going to look into:

* Displaying grayscale/color graphics on the Palm
* Displaying a custom (small) font
* A basic mip-and-texturemapped raycasting engine.
* Assembler? (Urg... I still haven't completed that course in college.)
* Music? (NOT a priority... most people use their Palms with sound off)

As for game mechanics beyond the graphical representation, that can be
done in Ansi C/C++ and prolly be run in a text-mode on a PC for
playtesting (this is where I will start).

Is anyone interested? The pace for the project will probably be
extremely slow, with small creative bursts whenever someone finds
something new... :)

Sincerely, Robert Hagenström