This is how I got 2048 on my iPAQ PDA (via Pocket Nester Plus) and played it a lot while listening to ripped CD music during a 2000s nostalgia rush I had in 2020. Good old times.

By the way, 8192 is the biggest tile in this implementation, either they didn’t want to draw ones with more than 4 digits or they hit hardware limits (tile ROM size?) they would need difficult hacks to overcome. The game does not stop fortunately: you can make 5 8192 tiles that won’t combine and a chain of 4 through 4096 that fills the board, and I did. You don’t get a game over screen if you fill up the board and there are 8192 tiles next to each other. It was interesting to use savestates instead of undos; the old SD card had awful (1 second) access times so save spamming was not an option. The RNG is deterministic so it took quite a few attempts to find the right move sequence that would spawn a 4 in the last few spots.

The battery was old so I could only get over an hour of playtime by disabling the backlight and using the screen’s reflectivity. Interestingly, Windows Mobile devices didn’t have a true “power down” state, the “power off” is what you would call sleep. There was no internal flash, the OS image is in ROM and everything lives on a RAMdisk. Every time the battery ran out, I needed to complete a touchscreen clalibration and tutorial, install my apps from the SD card, do a registry restore using a third-party registry editor (thankfully, most programs stored their settings in the registry too so the PocketNesterPlus key mapping was kept), and remap the front keys to my favorite games (PNP, Chuzzle Deluxe, FreeCell) and set the time, which I got quite quick at. Pressing the leftmost and rightmost keys at the same time while charging would reboot the system leaving the RAMdisk intact (handy to resolve hung states), or make the battery appear dead while not charging, forcing you to find a charger and reinitialize the device (very annoying in games, also there is barely rollover so no jumping while running in SMB).