Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/developer-gets-half-life-running-at-30-fps-on-a-2007-nokia-n95

by ljf • 1 month ago

330 119 1 month ago

https://twitter.com/dante_leoncini/status/206303501506830790...

ljf• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

tjoff• 1 month ago

N900 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.

jamesfinlayson7• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.

kotaKat2• 1 month 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.

ndiddy2• 1 month ago

What 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.

kotaKat2• 1 month ago

fun 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!

numpad0• 1 month ago

It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.

jkestner4• 1 month ago

Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.

ge963• 1 month ago

N900 was a crazy phone, ahead of its time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU

At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it

Maxion• 1 month ago

Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol

geoffeg2• 1 month ago

I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.

realityfactchex2• 1 month ago

They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s

As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.

YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.

burnte2• 1 month ago

I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.

nickcoury• 1 month ago

This reminds me of 3.5 inch floppy drives. They were last manufactured in 2011. You can still buy "new" ones where they pull internal drives from old corporate machines and then wrap them in a new plastic enclosure with USB converter board to make them an external drive.

jamesfinlayson7• 1 month 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• 1 month 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

jamesfinlayson7• 1 month 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).

inigyou2• 1 month ago

Everything's open source in the age of LLM-assisted Ghidra...

jamesfinlayson7• 1 month ago

I think Xash3D and ReHLDS are already most of the way there already.

DenisDolya• 1 month ago

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

inigyou2• 1 month ago

Probably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?

deniska• 1 month ago

Well, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs

a3w• 1 month ago

332 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.

iberator2• 1 month ago

nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)

Sharlin2• 1 month ago

Yeah, 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.

rightbyte• 1 month ago

Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.

Sharlin2• 1 month ago

Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.

Narishma2• 1 month ago

I played it back when it came out on a P166 in software mode and it was fine at that resolution.

system2• 1 month ago

Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.

Johanx64• 1 month ago

Pentium 1 133mhz ran Quake2 pretty darn well as long as you had hardware accel. Without hadware accel it was ass.

(maybe even Pentium 100)

andor• 1 month ago

It doesn't have a dual CPU or dual-core CPU. It's one CPU core plus a DSP core (which is probably not used by the game).

itrunsdoomguy• 1 month ago

I would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..

steadyw0• 1 month ago

Litteraly a phone out of his time

porphyra• 1 month ago

Wild 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).

p4bl02• 1 month ago

Oooh! 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.

jkestner4• 1 month ago

And you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.

Cloudef• 1 month ago

Symbian was really awful OS. Nokia's mistake was ignoring Maemo.

p4bl02• 1 month ago

I 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• 1 month ago

I 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• 1 month ago

This 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• 1 month ago

Eh. I’m on a 5 year old iPhone and it still feels perfectly fast.

usr1106• 1 month ago

Your 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.

ssl-3• 1 month ago

My 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.

zekica• 1 month ago

N95 was not "meager" for it's time - it was faster than the first iPhone.

socalgal2• 1 month ago

what 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-tech2• 1 month ago

Holy 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• 1 month ago

You might need to update your filters. Using AdGuard Pro on iOS I’m not seeing any ads.

stego-tech2• 1 month ago

Guess I get to figure out why gravity didn’t update or how Tom’s snuck past my filters this weekend.

Fweh.

ghastmaster• 1 month ago

I simply use brave browser at the moment. I did not see any ads.

dev1ycan• 1 month ago

Until MV3 catches up to Brave (eventually)

totetsu• 1 month ago

I 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_R... (2008)

M95D5• 1 month ago

No RomPatcher+ and InstallServer patch?

M95D5• 1 month ago

BTW, 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

CodeCompost• 1 month ago

How did he do it without the Half-life source-code?

nness• 1 month ago

"Ports of Half-Life to unusual platforms generally lean on Xash3D, an open-source engine compatible with Valve's GoldSrc"

msarrel• 1 month ago

I loved my n95.

Reefersleep• 1 month ago

Popup 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• 1 month ago

I guess it's time to bite the bullet and install Brave.

Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

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