Developing Games For Portable Devices (USB Drive, JumpDrive Etc.)

I have been looking into a few different ways lately to develop my games to work on portable devices, mainly USB sticks, so that my games can be taken on the go. Ther reason I got hooked on this was that a few months ago I purchased a new 4Gb Cruzer Micro made by SanDisk. Was on sale for 20 bucks, so couldn't really turn it down! My last one had been put through the washer by my wife ;)

One of the really neat things I liked about the device was that it came with a small application system named U3, which runs on Windows and powers a small menu, and allows you to install apps to the drive and take them on the go. It was a really neat idea, and I was able to install a few apps like Thunderbird and FireFox. One of the things I didn't like about the U3 system was that not a lot of games were available, and the games/apps that you could download, only a few of them were kept up to date.

I accidentally stumbled across http://www.portableapps.com which is the same sort of utilitiy as the U3 device, only it works on more than just SanDisk thumb drives. It can be installed on any portable device (USB stick, portable hard drive, MP3 Players etc.) very quickly. The default installation comes with a boat load of tools, ranging from email tools, to Firefox, IM clients, FTP clients and more. I also liked that their website had loads of available programs that were also current! The system also has OpenOffice installed, along with GAIM, Pidgin and Mozilla Sunbird (calendar and task manager, great tool!). From the get-go, the suite of tools is very useful.

The project is hosted on SourceFourge, meaning that the underlying system is open sourced, and is sure to be improved over time for newer and better features. They have SDK's available for the system, so when I get some time I will take a shot at porting some of my games to work with this mobile system. We often get requests for people re-asking for serial numbers for installation at work, or on a PocketPC, with this, they can just launch the game from a portable device!