PalmFish

Chess for Palm OS 5

The World's FIRST fully AI written PalmOS application!

Play real chess on your Palm, powered by a purpose-built native engine — now on a glassy high-density board.

PalmFish is a complete chess game for Palm OS 5 handhelds. Behind its glossy, tap-to-move board sits a from-scratch bare-metal ARM chess engine, not a watered-down mobile toy, but a genuine bitboard engine with a transposition table and iterative-deepening search, built specifically to run fast and light on your device's ARM processor. The whole engine is a hair over 13 KB.

Just tap a piece, tap where it goes, and play. The board renders in crisp double density with glassy pieces and squares, and a graphical toolbar (plus a Game menu) puts New Game, Undo, and Export a tap away. While the engine thinks, a flowing neon border sweeps the board so you always know it's working! A live evaluation bar shows who's ahead and how deeply it's looking.

PalmFish handles all the rules for you: legal moves, check (it'll tell you!), checkmate, stalemate, and draws. It thinks in the background so your handheld stays responsive — and it remembers your game, so you can quit and pick up right where you left off next time.

When the game's done, export the full scoresheet to your Memos with a single tap, then HotSync or beam it to your friends!

Features

• 🤖 A genuine bitboard engine in ~13 KB — not a lookup table
• 🪟 Glassy high-density board
• ♟️ Tap to move, with legal-move hints
• 🌈 Neon "thinking" glow and a live who's-winning bar
• 💾 Auto-saves your game — resume anytime
• 📝 One-tap scoresheet export to Memos

Requirements

• Any ARM-based Palm OS 5 handheld — Tungsten T-series, T|X, and compatible devices
• Optional, for the full 320×480 layout on ROMs without a native Dynamic Input Area (e.g. Tungsten T3): the free Tungsten T3 DIA Compatibility Update. Without it the game runs in a compact 320×320 layout until you open the input-area slider.

Known Issues

• v1.1 — None known. The v1.0.0 slider crash below is fixed: PalmFish no longer fights the OS for the screen, so opening and closing the input area is safe.
• ~~v1.0.0 — Instantly crashes when you open or close the slider on the Palm Tungsten T3~~ (fixed in v1.1)

Free & Open Source

PalmFish is free software under the GNU GPL v3. The complete source code, the 68k Palm front-end and the entire ARM engine, is available! You're welcome to read it, build it, learn from it, or improve it.

Registration

Free and Open Source (FOSS) Forever.

Compatibility

Download

Also Available At

• GitLab