I only owned one palm, the Palm VII which was the first taste of 2007 from back in ’99 or so.
Palm stumbled however delivering such a low powered low memory, low storage and amazingly out dated 68000 based machine, but what set it apart from all the rest was the integrated cellular modem. Raise the little antenna and you could send and receive emails, “browse” websites all from the palm of your hand. It really was fantastic, until I got the cellular bill. AT&T saw this as an ultra premium device and service, not something for normal people and priced it as an ultra niche thing. And it’s a shame as the future was right there, in the plam of your hand so to speak.
I looked on google play and picked up PHEM, and downloaded some ROMs. I started with the VII ROM out of nostalgia, but sadly the VII ROM I found is version 3.5
And naturally SimCity won’t work.
I kind of remember this being another issue with the VII, that it was basically a dead end evelotionary branch, not a vision or path forward. It was a fluke.
Version 4 devices were back to needing rs232 docks.
For me the future wouldn’t come back until 2002 with the first Windows CE phones, that features an ARM processor, expandability and a more robust OS.
I always thought there was no good full featured games back then, it’s amazing playing SimCity, even under emulation. Although if anyone wants to try, modern android phones run it far too quickly.
I had a Palm m100 for a while in the early 2000s.
The names are all forgotten now, but I had a great app which syncing websites (news mostly) for offline reading, some early ebook reading apps, and that copy of SimCity too 🙂
M100 was laughably underpowered even then, and the small amount of memory really sucked.
I likewise moved on to WinCE (HTC Magician), then to Symbian based (Nokia e71) devices as the reliability tended to better (CE would be unresponsive on incoming calls!) while waiting for the iPhone to basically be stocked.
The app for syncing websites was called AvantGo and I used it extensively as I didn’t have the modem option. I had a Palm m515 from about 2003-2005 and still have my Tungsten E2 kicking around somewhere. And yeah, I remember SimCity for Palm OS too. Of course, the monochrome version LGR shows doesn’t do it justice. It was impressive to see it in full color.
I used to play a color version on my Treo 650. Good times.
Now try SimCity for Psion.
Also there’s another palm emulator for widows mobile and android called Styletap
I’ve played it on my m515. I remember the game was not very challenging and the options were limited
It’s first generation SimCity. Honestly in the modern era, yeah it’s not especially challenging.
It’s more of a fish tank imho