I've received several emails lately, in addition to the posts on this forum, regarding the creation of Pocket Quake versions for many other types of Windows CE / Pocket PC devices. First off, let me say that this is an open source project, and that there are others currently working on producing builds of Pocket Quake for other Pocket PC devices. We'll just have to wait to see when and if any results are seen.
<br>Now, it is my opinion, based on my experience with the project coupled with the results of various benchmarks, that the only Pocket PC's powerful enough to run Quake in a
playable fashion are the iPaq and @migo. In addition to those two devices, there are HPC Pros that have StrongARM processors that could conceivably run PQ. The problem here is that the Game API is not available for those devices (the direct screen access is absolutely required to bypass the perfomance penalties imposed by using Windows CE to do the display drawing). I do feel that it would be possible for a playable version of PQ to be created for some of the more powerful HPC Pro devices, assuming that some form of direct screen access can be achieved through 3rd party libraries. However, that is exactly the type of contribution I would expect to be accomplished by other Windows CE programmers with experience in that particular area. A further potential problem with HPC devices is the screen size. Quake is playable on the ipaq at a 240x180 resolution. Because Quake is a 3D rendering engine, any increase in output resolution results directly in a large amount of additional processing to render those additional pixels. For some reason I doubt it would be acceptable for the typical HPC owner to play Quake at a miniscule 240x180, when their screen is 640x240. It would of course be possible to stretch the image to fit better, but the result would be blocky (and still result in additional overheard / reduction in fps).<br><br>So, to sum it all up, the source code to Pocket Quake is available, and a relatively small amount of work would be required to modify it to build for any Windows CE device (any device meeting the RAM / Storage requirements could
run PQ). However, unless the device is based on the 206 mhz StrongARM processor, I do not think the result would be
playable. It is barely playable on the iPaq, whose StrongARM processor far outperforms the SH3 and MIPS processors in the critical area of floating point operations.<br><br>Dan East<br>