I put up with a lot of unnecessary shit from my cell phone.
Last month I upgraded from my old Treo 650 — the phone I used to liveblog NFL games from sports bars three years ago — to a new Treo 755p. At least, it seemed like an upgrade. The 755p had more memory, built-in EVDO for faster Internet speeds, a headphone jack that worked and the ability to use high-capacity memory cards. I threw an 8MB microSDHC card in there and declared it my new MP3 player.
Of course, the last few days have made me wish I hadn’t sold that iPod on Craiglist so quickly. To put it mildly, the 755p is a big, fat buggy mess. It freezes at inopportune times and often requires 2 or 3 reboots a day. Connecting it to my PC results in an instant blue screen of death, so I have to use a backup tool on the phone itself to save my data in case things go terribly wrong — which has happened twice already. I’m getting just as good at hard resetting this Treo as I am with reinstalling Windows on my laptop.
Why do I put up with all this? Because in spite of all the bugs, the Treo does everything I want it to do and then some. I remain enamored with this whole idea of the “swiss army knife” gadget, the one device that does everything. The Treo is my cell phone, my calendar, my organizer, my on-the-go camera and word processor, my email-and-web-anywhere device, my road atlas (thank you, Google Maps), my MP3 player, and my portable video game console. If I had a Slingbox, I could watch live Champions League matches from anywhere.
The Treo does all these things — and it excels at absolutely none of them. When it works, though, it’s still pretty cool, because I can still do more with my Treo than I can with anything else. You can’t play Ms. Pac Man on an iPhone — only a 5G/6G iPod — while I have MAME on my Treo, so I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Galaga, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Hat Trick and obscure shit like Pepper II, Spectar and Q-Bert’s Qubes.
On top of that, I’ve got a console emulator on here that can play Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Turbo Grafx-16 games. They can play hacked ROMs, too, so Roethlisberger-to-Ward in Tecmo Super Bowl is doable. (And kind of cool.) The 16-bit console emulators are buggy as hell and require a lot of soft resets to run properly, but that didn’t stop me from going out looking for ROMs to run on them.
In fact, in my search for Genesis ROMs, I found not only multiple versions of Madden and FIFA, but also this little gem:
Yes, EA Sports gave us Rugby World Cup 95 for the Genesis, and it looks exactly as you think an EA Sports-coded rugby game for a 16-bit console might look:
Of course, I don’t have the first clue how to control the damn thing — ROMs don’t come with instruction booklets — but if I ever have some time to kill, I’m going to figure it out. I think it might help me appreciate rugby union a little bit more, and if I’m lucky, it’ll only require one or two reboots to work properly.
Still, you can’t do that on your iPhone or Crackberry, can you? Typing on an iPhone sucks, and it won’t run 3rd party apps (yet) or work with a Bluetooth keyboard, among other things. So I’ll stick with my buggy-ass Treo, thanks.
What I really want to know is this — where are the Aussie Rules games for the old 16-bit consoles? Did they not make any AFL games until the Playstation came out?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Simon // Feb 21, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Looks just like Rugby 07 , Damn EA!
2 a different Dave // Feb 21, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I’m a long time Palm OS user, I’m still holding out faint hope for the survival of the Palm OS platform in some form or other.
I’m currently using a Palm Treo 700p with Sprint, going on two years this April. I’ve had no complaints, I can’t remember the last time I had to do either a hard or soft reset. Mind you, I don’t use a lot of dodgy applications and I don’t play any old games with pirated ROMs; you definitely run the risk of fouling things up on Palm OS when you have lots of third party applications.
I mostly use my Treo for phone, internet web surfing, email, the basic Palm PDA applications (contacts, calender, memos, etc), a few old third party applications that I’ve been using since forever, and of course Slingbox. My previous Palm smartphones (Samsung i500, and before that the venerable Kyocera 6035) were all pretty rock solid, too. The key I think is to avoid applications that crash the Palm OS. Alas the Palm OS is ancient and in bad need of an upgrade path to something better. But it works well if you respect its limitations.
I also have a Palm Lifedrive as a backup which I mostly keep around for its larger storage capacity and WiFi. And I rely on an iPod for mp3s. I like the Treo’s ability to do everything, but somehow I always end up with a bunch of extra gadgets anyway. I guess I just like gadgets.
3 B. Minich // Feb 21, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Wow, this must be authentic: they have a streaker in this game. (Bottom game picture.)
4 Dave // Feb 22, 2008 at 1:13 am
B.: I’m pretty sure that’s the line judge.
Dave: Yeah, I do use a fair number of apps that are a little crashy. The emulators alone are probably OS stability nightmares, and I’m sure Pocket Tunes has its memory holes that screw things up in the OS. That’s the price you pay, though, when you want one gadget to do everything. And on the plus side, I have my pockets free for other stuff besides an MP3 player.
5 a different Dave // Feb 22, 2008 at 3:16 am
Pockets? Pockets? How un-nerdly! Real geeks have holsters:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/bags/9190/
6 MCG // Feb 22, 2008 at 11:57 am
If it’s ATT, the do a great job at fixing you right up. You turn your phone & they overnight you a new one. You have 10 days to ship yous back.
7 Dave // Feb 22, 2008 at 11:57 am
Oh, the Treo has always been holstered. The trick is to wear oversized football jerseys so that I don’t look like Batman.
8 Dave // Feb 22, 2008 at 12:05 pm
MCG: I made a conscious decision to avoid AT&T after that whole government wiretapping thing. I’m seriously hoping those bastards don’t get their grubby little paws on the 700 MHz spectrum.