This week the

I remember I got my first Palm (the Palm III) in 1999, shortly after we bought our first house. What is a Palm you ask? Well, it was a small handheld computer, the first one that was actually popular. Sure, the Apple Newton was probably a better overall product, but it was much more expensive, bigger and not nearly as practical for most people.

The Palm was smaller than an iPad mini, but bigger than an iPhone. It used a stylus with its touch screen and unlike the Newton which had handwriting recognition, the Palm used something called “Graffiti” which was essentially a set of standardized scribbles for each letter, number or punctuation. You could write one character at a time in the special stylus area and it would be displayed onscreen appropriately, assuming you did it right.

Initially the Palm only had a black and white screen and had no network connectivity, but color and network access (wifi) would be added in later versions. The Palm IIIc, the first color version, was probably my favorite overall. It would “sync” with your computer (PC or Mac) using its serial or USB port. This is how you would transfer data or apps to/from it.

You could often find me in meetings with my Palm III and a portable keyboard stand (the GoType), diligently taking notes!

Speaking of apps, Palm did not have any sort of official app store. Although there were some 3rd party stores that let you download apps (to a computer to install on the Palm manually), anyone could make an app and install it on the Palm. In 2000 I picked up something called NSBASIC/Palm, which was a BASIC IDE that ran on Windows for making Palm apps. The NS in its name apparently stands for “Nice and Smart”.

One of the most substantial things I made with it was a game called Pig. This is a dice game also known as Greedy and probably other names.

The game is played with two dice. You roll the dice adding up the score of each roll. But the trick is that your first roll is the “avoid” score. If you roll that value again, you lose all your points. You can stop at any time and keep the points you have.

So the idea is to maximize your points, but not get too greedy so that you end up with nothing. It’s a fun, simple game that I played with my family a lot as a kid.

With NS/BASIC I built a digital version of the game to play on the go. It supported four players with some computer opponents.

I even submitted it to the 2nd NSBASIC programming contest back in 2001. It didn’t win, but it is mentioned on the contest page, which is still available.

Pig by Paul Lefebvre Pig is a dice game. The source is included. It provides good examples for how to handle menus, screen objects (buttons and text), databases and processing. Its code is very structured and has strict formatting and naming standards which along with the comments should make it very easy to understand.

You can download Pig from here, with full source code.

If you want to give Pig a try, there is an online Palm emulator called CloudPilot and it can run Pig.

Here is a snippet of the Pig source:

function play() as integer
dim li_dice as integer
dim li_max_roll as integer
dim li_total as integer
dim li_adjust_roll as integer
  
 ' Computer play algorithm 
  gi_roll = 1
  
  li_dice = roll_dice()

  delay 0.5

  li_max_roll = gi_max_roll(li_dice)

  do while gi_roll <= li_max_roll
      gi_roll = gi_roll + 1
      li_dice = roll_dice()
      delay 0.5
      if li_dice > 0 then
         li_total = li_total + li_dice
         li_adjust_roll = gi_adjust_roll(li_dice)
         if gi_roll < 5 then li_adjust_roll = 0
         li_max_roll = li_max_roll + li_adjust_roll
      else
         li_max_roll = -1
      end if
   loop   

   if li_max_roll > 0 then
      call pass( 1 )
   end if

   play = li_max_roll

end function

I didn’t end up using NSBASIC for much else. Shortly after this I switched to Mac and ended up using Realbasic (now Xojo

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