# StarGrid has arrived, a Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025!

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This year my side project of choice was to create a brand new game for Palm OS, it started out as something that I thought I would finish in a month but ended up taking more than half a year in the end.

Let me present you with StarGrid, a space themed strategy game played on a hexagonal grid:

Your objective is to capture all the enemy flags or destroy all of your opponents.

Play it!

No Palm OS device at hand? No problem, just play it on your browser thanks to the CloudPilot emulator.

Game download and in-browser emulator

How it was made

Allot of ‘manual’ labor went into this game, no premade game engine, no additional sdk’s. Just making it from scratch, trying to solve one technical puzzle after another, but learning so many neat things along the way.

Coding for Palm certainly comes with it’s own obstacles:

– Memory is tight so you need to take into account devices that can’t even keep the playing field into memory, solution there was to hide the tiles when ships are moving.

– Maximum code size itself is also very limited, requiring you to segment your application into multiple individual parts. Detailed documentation on this was long gone, so I had to scrap some info together from developers that uploaded their 25 year old code to GitHub.

You can follow along the blog posts to see how I got here:

StarGrid: A new game I’m making for Palm OS in 2025
Building the CPU Player for StarGrid
Moving out of the vaporware phase – StarGrid’s alpha release for PalmOS is here!
StarGrid for Palm OS almost ready (and why do my side projects always explode in scope)

What’s next?

I won’t immediately jump into the next big sideproject, I think I need a breather. I do however have some ideas lined up that I’ve been wanting to explore for a while now:

– making a top-down racing game (think micromachines)

– create an Outrun or Lotus III-like racing game

– building a ray-tracing game (like wolf3d).

Much more exciting stuff to come.

Why do this?

It’s my way of keeping my favorite handheld operating system alive.

It’s all in the source!

For now I hope at least some people will enjoy playing StarGrid and even if it’s not their cup of tea, the game is fully open source, so I hope that can contribute to others making games and applications for this not-so-forgotten platform called Palm OS.

StarGrid on GitHub

Tags

RetroGames, PalmOS, Development, StarGrid

You can get in touch through Mastodon:

@rxpz@social.linux.pizza

StarGrid has arrived, a Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025! was published on 2025-10-21

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