We previously covered the Palm PDK when Aaron Ardiri of Mobile 1Up adapted his development solution to port to it. Well, now Aaron has taken on a completely different challenge.
According to Aaron, his company, Mobile 1UP, is porting its Lemmings implementation “as-is” from Palm OS to iPhone/iPod and the Palm Pre over the next few days, and is actually live-blogging the entire thing at mobile1up.com/lemmings/blog.
The final result of the Lemmings port will then be submitted to the various application stores and will be released for FREE, including all original 120 levels.
Mobile 1UP’s record for porting its previous games to Palm Pre is five hours, so they’ve already set the bar pretty high. That said, I know Aaron personally and he’s known for doing the impossible.
If you want to see what goes into coding at hyperspeed and making the impossible happen, check out his live blog at mobile1up.com/lemmings/blog. By the way, Aaron is coding in C and his environment allows him to make changes in one place and have them populated in all environments, including iPhone / iPad, webOS (Palm Pre), MacOS, Linux, and Windows.
We’re currently five hours in and Aaron has promised to deliver a MacOS binary for me to play around with in a few minutes. I’ll update this article as soon as I’ve had time to try it out and report back.
UPDATE: Aaron delivered as promised and I was able to launch the application and click around a bit. I verified that all 120 levels are intact and that it boots, so the porting fun has begun.
In Aaron’s words:
“We are five hours in and I forgot to eat and totally ignored the football. On the bright side, a mac osx demo is available showing some basic level loading functionality - all 120 levels are there :) now to port the underlying logic over!”
I also asked Aaron to give us a bit more detail into how the whole porting process works:
“To make this happen we are using our own in-house built development environment - we have separated the platform from the business logic of the application, yet still program in C to ensure native execution speed and maximum portability. We are five hours in and going well - Lemmings started as a Palm OS application in 2001 and so far it has been smooth sailing to rebuild this in 2010. The next challenge is to get the little guys showing up and being themselves.”
If you want to see what the port is looking like for yourself, Aaron has posted up a MacOS binary at the live blog.
UPDATE2: It’s now 26 hours since Aaron started. With a brief break for some sleeping (6 hours) and lunch and other things (3 hours), he now has a version that has the lemmings interacting with their environment. This includes going “splat” when they fall onto a hard surface, and also navigating their way around a variety of landscapes. In addition, he wanted to prove that it works on the Palm Pre, so he compiled a version for it–see below.
So, 17 hours in and the game is almost playable. Did I mention that Aaron is doing this ALL BY HIMSELF? Impressive work, Aaron. Keep it up!
