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Bubbles for Pocket PC 2002
Overview
Bubbles is a board game designed for use on the Pocket PC. The game
starts with a board full of colored balls (called bubbles). Adjacent
bubbles with the same color can be removed from the board. The more
bubbles you remove in a turn, the more points you score. When you
clear the entire board you get bonus points.
The game is easy to learn, but hard to master. That's the beauty of
it. When you first try the game then it seems easy, until you hear
that other people score over 3000 points (using standard settings).
Scores typically range from just above 1000 points until over 5000
points. The highest possible score with default settings is 9050,
however the highest score I have seen was just above 5000. The game
is very addictive, so beware before you install it on your Pocket PC.
The creation and evolution of Bubbles
Dutch attendees of TechED 2000 in Amsterdam received a free Compaq
iPaq. It's a Pocket PC running Windows CE v3.0 and it's great piece
of hardware. A friend of mine had a Psion Revo, which is shipped
with a great game called Cascade. During TechED I got a
C++ compiler for the Pocket PC, so I started writing a Cascade clone.
The first version was already finished before I got my Pocket PC,
so it was tested in emulation only. It was written using MFC for CE,
but I threw away MFC pretty early and replaced it with the ATL window
classes. Unfortunately the WTL library isn't available for CE yet,
so I couldn't use it. The ATL version works with all Win32 platforms,
including Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000. The bare game was
only 32Kb in size on the CE platform (including bitmaps, sound,
etc...). The desktop version was almost twice as big (although it
was 99% code compatible).
Nearly a month after TechED 2000 I finally got my Pocket PC and I
downloaded Bubbles. It worked right out of the box, so the emulation
is probably pretty good. Several friends of mine also have a Pocket
PC, so I shared the first versions among them and the race for the
highest score had begon. Bubbles was a big hit, so I wanted to extend
the application, so it looks better and had some added features. I
was little bit disappointed when I found out that other developers
had created the same game (see the bottom of this page for links).
Decide which game you like the most and keep it. I like Bubbles the
most, but my opinion might not be very objective.
What's hot and what's not
The current version of Bubbles is sufficient for a whole lot of
fun. It has the following features:
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Three different levels of difficulty (easy, moderate and hard).
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Highscore list, so you have prove when you reach a good score. It's
also possible to reset the list of highscores.
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Synchronizing highscores with other Bubbles users using the
infrared port.
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Single move undo, so you can always go back to the previous state
when you accidently hit the wrong bubble.
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Very neat about dialog, which is similar to the picture shown at the
top of this page. The logo is created using
POV-Ray.
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Full source code available, so you can customize and extend it the
way you want. Maybe you can even learn something. Please send any
improvements to me, so I can include them into Bubbles.
Some features are still missing. I might implement it in a future
version, but don't expect anything soon. The following features are
planned:
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Double tap support, which can be found in other Cascade clones. It
looks very nice, but I personally like single tapping. Tapping the
wrong bubble by accident isn't a problem, because there is a single
level undo. Nothing has been done to implement this feature (well,
I did add an additional checkbox to the options window).
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Several different skins for the bubble bitmaps. The problems isn't
designing new bitmaps (has already been done) or painting the other
bitmaps (just loading another resource). The real pain is selecting
new bitmaps in a pretty way.
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Help file for the game, explaining the various options and rules
of the game.
Links
Although my version is probably the only Cascade-like game, which has
source included, it's not the only clone around. This is a list of
other Cascade clones for the Pocket PC or desktop:
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PocketPop
looks very much like Bubbles and is also free of charge. PocketPop
uses a different method of removing items from the matrix. The
first time you hit a bal, it shows which balls will be removed and
how many points you get. The second time it actually removes the
balls. You can easily see how many points you get for a certain
action, which is pretty neat. If I had known about PocketPop, I
would probably never started Bubbles at all.
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Bubblets is a
commercial Cascade clone, which looks pretty good, but it costs
money and why pay if you can get it for free?
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Pocket Marbles
is also a commercial Cascade clone, which doesn't look very good. It
has no options that cannot be found in freeware versions. Hardly
worth mentioning, but I wanted to be complete in this list.
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A friend of mine created a
Bubbles clone in Java
and can be played on the net. It also has a highscore list on it, so
try to beat the best so far.
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Bubbles can also be found on the net. It has been reviewed by several
magazines and most people like it a lot.
If you know about more Cascade clones, please mail me.
Legal statement
This program is copyrighted by Ramon de Klein and distributed under
terms of the GNU General Public License.
History
v1.1
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Ported release to PocketPC 2002 SDK. Only the ARM release
is supported, because PocketPC 2002 doesn't support other
platforms. This also dropped support for the MS-DOS version.
v1.0
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First official non-beta version of Bubbles. Nothing has really
changed much, because I didn't receive any bugs during the past
three months.
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Synchronized some code with Tetris for a better and more uniform
User Interface.
v1.0 (beta 3)
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Fixed GDI object leak in paint routine. This could cause a lock-up
when the system runs out of resources.
v1.0 (beta 2)
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Added support for MIPS and SH3 based Pocket PCs (untested). Because
I only have a Compaq iPaq (ARM) I cannot test these platforms.
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Improved source code package. It now includes the source-code for
the Bubbles logo, Setup program and the IrDA include file (so you
don't need the Windows 2000 Platform SDK).
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Fixed re-activation problem when a dialog is open. Thanks to Kim
Barnett for pointing out how MFC solves this problem. The fix is
nasty and undocumented, but it seems to work.
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Removed unused bitmaps (reduces executable size with a few bytes).
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Updated version resource.
v1.0 (beta 1)
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Initial release for ARM and Win32 platform.
Download
Before you download one of the packages, listed below, you must make
sure that you've read the legal statement.
 Bubbles.zip
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Bubbles executable package compiled for use on a Pocket PC 2002.
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Bubbles_src.zip
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Bubbles source package containing the source code and project
files for all supported Bubbles platforms. You need at least
Embedded Visual C++ v3.0 with the Pocket PC 2002 SDK to
compile and link the code.
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Bubbles (old).zip
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Bubbles executable package compiled for use on a Pocket PC running
Windows CE v3.0 with an ARM/MIPS/SH3 processor. This is an old
version (v1.0) and is not maintained anymore.
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Bubbles (old, Win32).zip
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Bubbles executable package compiled for use on a desktop Windows
operating system (Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT4 or Win2000) with
an Intel X86 processor. Don't expect a fancy game for these
platforms, because it was primarily developed for use on a
Pocket PC. IrDA sockets is supported from Windows 2000 and later,
so infrared support will probably fail on other platforms. This
is an old version (v1.0) and is not maintained anymore.
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Bubbles_src (old).zip
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Bubbles source package containing the source code and project
files for all supported Bubbles platforms. You need at least
Visual C++ v6.0 or Embedded Visual C++ v3.0 with the Pocket PC
SDK to compile and link the code. This is an old version
(v1.0) and is not maintained anymore.
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