Electronic gaming has been around for more than two decades. While lots of games and game companies have come and gone over the years, the classics still remain a staple in the diet of many hardcore gamers. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Scorched Earth, and others may have been eclipsed years ago in terms of complexity, graphics, sound, and sheer lines of code, but the fact remains that what was fun in 1983 is still fun in 2001. The flourishing of the emulation community over recent years has guaranteed that while new titles are the main source of revenue for most gaming companies, the old games are still alive and well.

On the Pocket PC platform, the range of game titles is becoming a similarly eclectic mix of the new and old. This article looks at two different titles: LEDhead and RocketElite. LEDhead, attempts to replicate several of the first handheld gaming devices from Mattel by mimicking them as closely as possible. RocketElite is an ambitious game that seeks to push the limits of the Pocket PC platform, offering users sophisticated game play that combines elements of several older games while giving them a modern twist.

Mattel's original Electronic Hockey game (left) is about the size of a Pocket PC. LEDhead's version of the game as it would appear on a Pocket PC. Proportions are approximately correct.

LEDhead: Good games never die

The late 1970s and early 1980s were good for Mattel Electronics. The toy and game industries were booming, thanks primarily to advances in miniature electronics. New management at Mattel in 1977 ushered in the era of portable electronic games, which, along with Mattel's Intellivision console gaming system, would sell well into the 1980s.

Each device could play one game, mostly sports titles (Hockey, Football, Basketball, etc.). But the devices were inexpensive, portable, rugged, and fun to play. The games were pretty crude, even by the standards of the day. Their displays were based on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). This inexpensive and reliable technology had been around for decades, used primarily in instruments and control panels. What LEDs meant for gaming in 1977 was that "graphics" could be created consisting of various arrangements of LEDs, usually under a painted plastic screen. Everything on the screen--including players and objects--was represented by the LEDs. Sound was crude, consisting of blips and beeps made by simple speakers.

While this technology required you to use your imagination to a certain extent and wasn't always easy on the eyes, the games were portable and economical and unlike anything that had come before. They were boxy and slightly larger than most of today's Pocket PCs, but they were fun to play.

LEDhead is a freeware program that allows gamers to relive several of these old LED-based games. Designed by programmer and vintage game enthusiast Peter Hirschberg (www.peterhirschberg.com), LEDhead is a work-in-progress (the current release is designated Alpha 4 as of December 20, 2001). Peter designed LEDhead to prevent these games from fading into obscurity as the actual devices become increasingly rare and inoperable with age. According to the author's Web site, Mattel released a total of 14 LED-based handheld games, seven of which (Auto Race, Basketball, Football, Football II, Hockey, Ski Slalom, and Space Alert) are available in the current release of LEDhead.

Faithful reproductions

Strictly speaking, LEDhead isn't an emulator; it doesn't use the actual "ROM images" (the actual game code) from the games. The original Mattel devices are designed in such a way that makes it impossible to transfer any information from them into a PC-readable format. Instead, the author of LEDhead wrote fresh code based on hours of playing the original devices. This presented some unique challenges, since it required an intensive, hands-on knowledge of each game's unique characteristics.