Menneisyys

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

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MS MVP- Mobile Devices.