Old hardware is cool

I have a working prototype of my son's firefighting helicopter game in J2ME. It runs on my old Blackberry 8700. That's pretty cool as it means I might be able to find old J2ME-capable phones so that the kids can run the games easily.

The Leapfrog Didj has been sold by woot for 20$ and then 15$. That's cheap for a 393MHz ARM, 32MB of RAM and a QVGA screen... The first time around nobody was hacking it but now it has seen quite a bit of cool hacks (plug a serial console, SD card etc.) and was feature on Hack A day as part of their partnership with Woot. I think the machine could run little 2D games like the one I wrote for my son. I wonder if it would be easier to use pygames or try to run J2ME (gcj maybe?).

I also found my wife's old Palm Tungsten E in a drawer and it still works! The CPU is rather slow but it's a touch screen, and the device is really cute and pleasant. The IO possibilities are rather limited unfortunately: no WIFI, no Bluetooth, no camera, no accelerometers, no GPS, no USB host. I think I'll just install some drawing software for the kids and maybe put some MP3 on a card. There is also some IR capability so this could be used as a remote and maybe other fun uses.