Blender for pocketPC Revived
Do you remember Blender for the IPAQ? It was one of the projects we did at Not a Number, I guess to prove to the investors that mobile 3D was feasible. Amazingly, it worked and for a while it was good. Unfortunately, the IPAQ version was not part of the Open Source deal that the Blender Foundation struck with the investors so after the second bankruptcy it was no longer available.
Until now.
Salvatore has started a project to bring Blender for pocketPC back to life. You can follow his endeavours on his blog. There are no downloads available yet, but he already has a few screenshots to show the work in progress:
Blender is a fantastic open source package providing almost everything you could need in Computer Graphics. It was already ported for old IPAQ but the project was not open source.
The aim of this Blog is to provide all information about the advancement of BlenderCE, a project to make Blender run again on all modern PocketPC. Don’t hesitate to comment any article or make suggestions. And if you want to join me in this adventure, you are welcomed.
What’s the story with the blue, orange-suited alien in the picture? I’ve seen the little guy pop up occasionally in the older (I think NaN period) Blender stuff, but without any background information such as who made him or who he is, so I’m curious. For example, he’s in a commercial from when Blender was first ported to Mac OS X that was on the old blender3d.org site as the “Blender Demo Reel” — I couldn’t find a link to it on the current site but it’s still online:
http://blender3d.com/_media/gallery/trailer/BlenderTrailerHigh.mpg
The alien was a character in a game called ‘Hardmashed’ that was made by NaN’s game department. It was so funny that it turned into a mascot, I guess. For a while it was on the blender3d.org homepage where it was trying to sell e-shop products (and failed miserably ;-).
I just asked Ton and it turns out that we still have it available online.
I’m not sure why, but you have to switch to another scene and then back to the ‘X.game. scene to see him. Oh, AND you’ll see the blue alien girl, too :)
Enjoy!
Darn it!
I’m the only one really happy about this revival !
or reacting to this news months l8r….
I bought an ipaq 3970 in april 2006 and only got it working today(new battery).
I want to use it to SHOW people what CAN be done with blender, and what i’ve done with blender…
anybody know any links to HOWTO get the binary running on it ?
and if it works with 3970 ?
all i found so far is that it’s hard to getrunning..
i’ll check out the blog, hope he didn’t quit because no-one is interesed, who cares about that dumb-ass alien ? THIS IS A GREAT NEW BLENDER GADGET!!!
okey it may look silly but it’s not a dumb-ass alien, it’s funny enoug to be a mascotte, and hopefully stars in upcoming blender game-engine games, of which there are waaaay to few !!!
the new site is http://russose.free.fr/BlenderPocket/
Thanks for the update – I’ve changed the link in the post.