Developer Gets Half-Life Running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

(tomshardware.com)

25 points | by ljf 14 hours ago ago

8 comments

  • ljf 14 hours ago ago

    To 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 13 hours ago ago

      Teenage 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.

    • jamesfinlayson 12 hours ago 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.

  • DenisDolya 2 hours ago ago

    Now instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?

  • jamesfinlayson 11 hours ago ago

    Impressive.

    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 8 hours ago ago

      There 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

      • jamesfinlayson 7 hours ago ago

        Yeah 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).

  • kotaKat 12 hours ago ago

    I 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

    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 since it's not linked from TomsHardware.