Back in the late seventies or early eighties, you may have had a Light-emitting diode (LED)-based handheld game console. They were manufactured by Mattel and a complete list of them is available
HERE. They were pretty simplistic but still great fun and are, today, very hard to find (they’re typically a collector’s item offered accordingly at high prices).
Should you want to play some of these games under Windows Mobile (or, for that matter,
Palm OS or the desktop
Windows (even
Vista)), you will want to turn to
Peter Hirschberg’s LEDhead, the faithful reimplementation of some of these games. While only part of the original LED games have been re-implemented (compare the list of the originally available games
HERE and the implemented games
HERE), you may still find the currently available games fun or, at least, nice to bring up memories of those ages.
Fortunately, the games run flawlessly on all Windows Mobile devices – even WM5 / WM6 ones. Some example screenshots of them running on VGA devices:
(Auto Race)
(Space Alert)
As in the desktop version,
the main menu allows for selecting the game you’d like to play. You can also redefine
the hardware buttons (unfortunately, the app doesn’t read all the buttons dynamically – that is, if your handheld has more than 4 buttons, it’ll still list only four)
Getting, using
Get the emulator
HERE (alternate download
HERE) . Unzip the file and transfer
LEDhead.exe and
LEDhead.dll to your handheld. Start the former; select the game to run in the left list and click Start Game in the upper right corner. You can also disable sounds (using the
Mute checkbox) and assign controls to hardware buttons.
Note that it also has an SH3 and a MIPS version, should you have an old PPC2k handheld.
Recommended reading
Allen Gall’s LEDhead and RocketElite: Best of the Old and New!
Handheld Games Museum’s related page
