History of video games/Platforms/Tapwave Zodiac

Development
Tapwave was a company based in Mountain View, California. The Tapwave Zodiac was co-developed by Byron Connel, a former Palm employee. Tapwave worked with Summit Design and another firm to develop 17 concept consoles and several prototypes.

Prior to launch, the system was known as the Tapwave Helix, with slightly different announced specifications then the final release.

Launch
The Tapwave Zodiac was released in 2003. The Zodiac 1 cost $299 and the higher spec Zodiac 2 cost $399. The Zodiac was released in the UK in 2004, and a release was planned for Germany in 2005.

Legacy
The Tapwave Zodiac was formally announced to be discontinued on July 28th, 2005 with an abrupt message on their website, with support services ending a few days earlier on July 25th, 2005. Under 200,000 Tapwave Zodiac handhelds were sold. The discontinuation of the device was seen as a bad sign for the Palm OS ecosystem as a whole.

The Tapwave Zodiac is remembered for being a cutting edge device that showed technology which would later see more widespread adoption.

Compute
The Tapwave Zodiac used a Motorola iMX1 processor based on the ARM architecture and clocked at 200MHz.

The Zodiac 1 comes with 32MB of RAM, while the Zodiac 2 has 128MB of RAM. Official developers were required to make their games run on both systems.

Graphics
The GPU used in the Tapwave Zodiac was a ATI Imageon W4200 with 8MB of VRAM.

The Tapwave Zodiac has a 3.8 inch, color transflective display with a resolution of 480 by 320 pixels.

Hardware
The Tapwave Zodiac supported wireless communication through an IrDA communication port, as well as bluetooth.

The Tapwave Zodiac has a 1540 mAh rechargeable lithium chemistry battery.

Software
The Tapwave Zodiac runs Palm OS 5.2T. This operating system choice was finalized in May 2002, one year after development began to leverage an existing large base of developers for Palm OS, as well as for it's existing large library of applications. The operating system was modified to allow for access to Tapwave specific functions, like it's GPU, analog stick, and Rumble feedback.

The Tapwave Zodiac has an internet browser.

Notable games
Most games for the Tapwave Zodiac were either existing Palm PDA games, or Tapwave exclusive ports that leveraged the specific hardware of the device.
 * Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
 * Doom II
 * Duke Nukem Mobile
 * SpyHunter

External Resources

 * Video Game Kraken - Tapwave Zodiac page.