PalmPilot was a small handheld device that the American digital assistant developer Palm Inc. released into the world in 1997. Before smartphones were ubiquitous, this small handheld PC allowed you to write notes, keep track of events, and synchronize them with your desktop. It also featured a bunch of simple applications and video games for users to mess around with, most of which were designed specifically for the device.
In 2021, Christian Speckner (DirtyHairy) and Pinchies released their web-based emulator CloudPilot, to help the nostalgic among us re-experience some of these apps and games in the modern day and with minimal fuss. And now it seems that there's more good news for those who have fond memories of the device.
On Twitter, earlier today (24th November), the historian and archivist Jason Scott (@textfiles) revealed that they are adding PalmPilot emulation to Internet Archive "for the holidays", and that they will be making a proper announcement "probably next week".
At the moment, a total of 116 Palm and PalmPilot games are available on archive.org, including Chess, Checkers, Invaders, BattleShip, FrogVCar, and many others. While most of these are simple takes on already existing games, they're still a lot of fun to drop in and out of.
We haven't had time to check them all out yet, but we should note that there are definitely some we encountered that seem more functional than others at present. There are also a few that require some trial and error to figure out the controls. Hopefully, with a proper announcement on the way, some of these quirks will be ironed out in time.