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Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95
https://twitter.com/dante_leoncini/status/2063035015068307905 https://twitter.com/dante_leoncini/status/206303501506830790...
- ljf 4mo agoTo me the Nokia N95 was close to a perfect phone, only the E61 or 62 then the E72 could beat it, especially for the price at the time. I still like to think of a parallel time line where Symbian actually had a good and usable app store, and developers had been supported.
- app134 4mo agoTeenage me would've killed for an N900 back in the day. Went with an iPhone 3GS. Still think about that from time to time. I don't regret it, per-se, as the jailbreak scene at the time was very exciting.
- tjoff 4mo agoN900 wasn't symbian, if that was what you implied. It ran Maemo 5, and I still miss it even though I never owned one myself. Unfortunately Nokia fumbled everything.
- tosti 4mo agoAnd it was based on Debian. Installing an "app" was quite literally installing a deb package. Back in the day, I was working at a mobile software company and they had to call the IT guy (i.e. me) to explain how packaging works in Debian, just for the new Nokia they sent us, about a month before official launch. I tought the gadget was adorable.
- fsflover 4mo agoSuch phones also exist today. Have a look at Librem 5 and Pinephone.
- jamesfinlayson 4mo ago> developers had been supported Before my time but I remember an old colleague saying how hard it was to find decent documentation for Symbian development.
- ezst 4mo agoWent from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.
- kotaKat 4mo agoI noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747 https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747 Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s... Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works! I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95. https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.
- ndiddy 4mo agoWhat is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.
- kotaKat 4mo agofun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned. OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time. I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap. EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
- Melatonic 4mo agoThat's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ? There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons
- jamesfinlayson 4mo agoImpressive. Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.
- skotobaza 4mo agoThere is an open Half-Life 1 SDK on Valve's GitHub [1], not sure if it's missing something regarding the engine. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife
- jamesfinlayson 4mo agoYeah that's just the game logic which has been out since 1999. The rendering/networking/animation/UI/sound etc stuff is all still closed source (though apparently there is a leak from a Counter-Strike Online developer circulating among private hands - some code was contributed to Xash3D which perfectly implemented a non-trivial scripting system which was suspicious enough that it was removed).
- redox99 4mo agoWhat scripting system?
- jamesfinlayson 4mo agoThe .seq files that Ritual introduced in Condition Zero Deleted Scenes.
- WorldMaker 4mo agoIsn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it. I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.
- DenisDolya 4mo agoNow instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?
- inigyou 4mo agoProbably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?
- deniska 4mo agoWell, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs
- Apocryphon 4mo agoMight as well skip to Crysis at this rate.
- a3w 4mo ago332 MHz Dual ARM 11 ?! Half-Life ran smooth in Pentium 100 single core. Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.
- iberator 4mo agonope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)
- Sharlin 4mo agoYeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.
- HerbManic 4mo agoYeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient. "My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!" I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.
- eptcyka 4mo agoIf you condition yourself to be OK with 15-25 fps, it's almost fine. If you run a game at 60FPS generally, then an occasional hiccup of 100ms will really throw you off. Similarly, the gameplay must be designed differently between low and high FPS games - you don't want the player to feel like they'd have been able to play the game differently if it was running smoother.
- 4mo ago
- bendndndn 4mo ago[dead]
- itrunsdoomguy 4mo agoI would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..
- simonw 4mo ago[dead]
- steadyw0 4mo agoLitteraly a phone out of his time
- porphyra 4mo agoWild how back in the days, phone chips were 10 years behind PCs in performance, but now they are almost the same (in single-core performance, anyway).
- p4bl0 4mo agoOooh! I fondly remember my N95! Pictures and movies it took were great, at least for the time, and it had apps and a lot of stuffs like a browser that were presented as new on the phone space when the first iPhone was released, while I had my N95 for almost a year at this time. Symbian was a really nice system.
- jkestner 4mo agoAnd you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.
- Cloudef 4mo agoSymbian was really awful OS. Nokia's mistake was ignoring Maemo.
- p4bl0 4mo agoI liked Symbian a lot, but I agree that Maemo was superior! Two after what I told above, in 2010, a few friends of mine had N900 and they seemed great. I was still in my study at the time and I interviewed for a summer internship at Nokia to work on Maemo and it was going great, but at some point during the recruitment process, that part of Nokia was sold (to Intel I think? the MeeGo project was announced a bit later) so they stopped all hiring even of interns and I had to find another internship.
- varispeed 4mo agoI had this phone when it was released. I really loved it. But one thing I remember the most was using it as fidgeting toy. Just opening and closing it. So satisfying.
- jonhohle 4mo agoThis makes me sad. Not that this work was done, it’s incredible, but that we’ve fallen so far from what was possible on meager hardware. Now everyone has a super computer in Their pocket that feel slow.
- therealdrag0 4mo agoEh. I’m on a 5 year old iPhone and it still feels perfectly fast.
- usr1106 4mo agoYour 5 year old iPhone has how many cores, how many GBs of RAM? I would need to search the specs, but a N95 has 1 core and well below 1GB. A factor of dozens in the specs, but still you can get good user experience on the old devices if the software is written in a smart way. The lower resolution of the N95 acts in favor of performance. But admittedly against user experience.
- pavlov 4mo ago64MB RAM on the Nokia N95.
- zamadatix 4mo agoAnd their 5 year old iPhone can run a game that looks a hell of a lot better than Half-Life on 320x240@30 FPS too. Just listing that the hardware is different than the other doesn't give a comparison. Was there really not a shittily made app for the N95 at all? Are there really not apps that perform well on a 5 year old iPhone? We're just looking at a single app optimized for a platform nearly 2 decades after release and somehow concluding people don't ever optimize software these days. Some software is always going to be inefficient as can be but there is more well optimized software available now than there ever has been.
- ssl-3 4mo agoMy 6-year-old Samsung usually feels pretty quick, too, with its 8 CPU cores and 12GB of RAM. We used to do most of the same things (browse the web, send some email or texts, make phone calls, listen to music, watch videos) with hardware that was positively tiny by comparison.
- socalgal2 4mo agowhat if any games have you played lately that you considered similar to Half-Life (all cutscenes in game while you are 100% interactive and free to do whatever, including ignoring the NPC)
- stego-tech 4mo agoHoly sh*t Tom’s Hardware has gone downhill. Every advert snuck past both my Pi-Hole and my iOS filters, and it even tried forcing a file download on site open on my iPhone. As for the HL1 port: I love it, always wanted an N95 (I had an N80ie that I loved), and these sorts of retro experiments are always a joy to read about.
- donkers 4mo agoYou might need to update your filters. Using AdGuard Pro on iOS I’m not seeing any ads.
- stego-tech 4mo agoGuess I get to figure out why gravity didn’t update or how Tom’s snuck past my filters this weekend. Fweh.
- ghastmaster 4mo agoI simply use brave browser at the moment. I did not see any ads.
- totetsu 4mo agoI remember getting a self signing cert from some shady Chinese homepage in the 200Xs and loading and connecting to Quakeworld onto my Nokia Symbian phone around that time. edit: https://allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Get_Quake_Running_on_Your_S60_Smartphone.php https://allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Get_Quake_R... (2008)
- M95D 4mo agoNo RomPatcher+ and InstallServer patch?
- M95D 4mo agoBTW, if anyone is interested, there's a TLS patch for Nokia S60v3 and UIQ based on mbedtls. Makes mail work again. https://github.com/JigokuMaster/Symbian-TLS-Patch https://github.com/JigokuMaster/Symbian-TLS-Patch
- CodeCompost 4mo agoHow did he do it without the Half-life source-code?
- nness 4mo ago"Ports of Half-Life to unusual platforms generally lean on Xash3D, an open-source engine compatible with Valve's GoldSrc"
- msarrel 4mo agoI loved my n95.
- Reefersleep 4mo agoPopup with "Do you want to download <several lines of random characters> from tomshardware.com ?" No thank you, and I won't be coming back.
- aand16 4mo agoI guess it's time to bite the bullet and install Brave.