The man who put Lemmings on the Palm Pilot just put his whole Palm OS toolbox on GitHub

Aaron Ardiri, the developer behind the Palm OS port of Lemmings, just published about a gigabyte of old Palm OS development material on GitHub. The Register reported that the files had sat in his personal backups for more than 25 years. What got him to open the vault was a pull request.

Somebody had sent a change to his old Lemmings source code, adding HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3. Ardiri told The Register he had no idea people were still improving that software more than two decades later. (Every Palm owner I knew had Lemmings on it, so this tracks.) Then he found the Palm fans on Reddit and Discord hunting for exactly the kind of stuff sitting on his backup drives. He also told The Register he recently handed more than 50 old Palm devices to Dmitry Grinberg, who works on keeping Palm OS alive.

The archive’s GitHub page lists SDKs, developer conference presentations, utilities, programming examples and a limited release of Palm OS source code for versions 3.5, 4.0 and 5.0. He left out the things he didn’t have permission to hand around, like ROM images, firmware, simulators and commercial apps, and The Register notes that being on GitHub doesn’t make any of it open source. The Lemmings code itself has been out for a while; PalmDB lists the full open-source package, port by Ardiri and Chip Kerchner, submitted back in November 2021, and it carries no affiliation with Psygnosis.

If you’ve still got a Tungsten or a Zire in a drawer, I’d dig it out. Fans are still patching Lemmings for the Tungsten T3, the full package is free on PalmDB, and if you want to write something of your own, the archive hands you the original SDKs.

Grab your stylus. It’s been a while.