xash3d is based
I had Quake 3 Arena running on my N95, when the phone was still relevant, someone ported all 3 Quakes to it and they ran really well. I know people are glazing it in this thread but it was such a great example of why Nokia died.
It had a proper PowerVR GPU, same one as the iPhone. Should have been great… except the OS didn’t even use it. Most games neglected to as well. When they did use it, like with NGage or OVI titles they worked great, but the OS and apps felt as dated and laggy as ever thanks to S60.
Had great Bluetooth support, full A2DP when iPhones couldn’t even change volume over Bluetooth. But Bluetooth headphones had limited battery life, usually only 1-2 hours in that era. What happens when they die? Auto-pause? No, IMMEDIATELY play your music over the loudest speaker in the world in the middle of the subway.
Why put in such advanced hardware and not take advantage of it properly? Because the OS & Hardware teams didn’t talk to each other. Apparently hardware would dictate features, OS would code to support them and nobody was looking at the big picture.
Thanks for the context!
I got a blackberry pearl and explained to my kids that it had better specs than my first PC in every category except screen size.
And if you’d had a Osborne, not even that.
phone resolution is only 240x320. do it again at 1600x1200 (what my 19in trinitron from that era runs at), or even just 1024x768.
Who actually ran HL1 at 1600x1200 or 1024x768 in 1998 unless they had a high-end PC? The minimum requirements basically expect 320x240.
As an aside, I’m really, really tired of people quoting the larger number after the smaller number for landscape resolutions. X goes BEFORE Y, damn it! I know this is the publication’s fault, because they did the same thing in a different article.
To be fair, not far from your average crt monitor in 1998, maybe 640 x 480.
I ran Half-Life at 400x300, because I didn’t even had a 3D accelerator.
800x600 was perfectly fine on my (family computer) 1997* era ATi Rage Pro 8MB AGP (funnily enough, it was slightly slower than the PCI version) card for Half Life 1. 1024x768 too but less FPS. Quake 3 Arena ran better.
It’s four times smaller, though, so enough to make a significant difference
What?! Was I so privileged to have a 720p CRT at the time? (ok well not literally 720p, but a higher resolution 4:3… 800x600)
… actually remembering it, it was probably well after 1998, but I have plenty of memories going, “mmmm, 800x600”. maybe even more at 1024x768.
I only really started to understand what it all meant and how neat better resolution was with Unreal Tournament, so… definitely post 1999
800x600 is 600p. 720p is 1280x720
N95 and other phones in that series were a different set of beasts. I remember those phones playing videos with much higher resolution than its screen resolution. My first android smart phone in 2014 did not managed to do that.
Miss the days that companies strived to give you the best hardware.
And a modern phone can match about a 1000 Cray Supercomputers.
That’s cray cray * 500.
It’s coming to GBA one of these days.
Man, old Nokias were just peak. The E70 is still my favourite phone I’ve ever had, and I’m so sad about their downfall in general. At this point I’ve probably fully gotten used to a touchscreen, but I still miss that full QWERTY physical keyboard. Typed faster on that than I ever seem to be able to on a touch keyboard, even with autocorrect.
You’re not the only E70 enjoyer
Man, I love relics of the old internet. I know it’s hard to believe for the younger generations but… this place used to be good.
Same :)
You may also like https://wiby.org/surprise/
Loads random old sites on each visit. Many don’t support https, so browser warnings ahoy.
I was just about to say this would be a great post for !webrevival@lemm.ee but… yeah :/
Shame it hasn’t been revived at another instance as far as I know.
i wouldn’t say it matchs pcs as other have pointed out, still impressive and i say we should use half-life as the next step in putting games on small devices we shouldn’t be able to. as a step up if we already have doom on it.
oh man I loved my n95. it had its own T9 software that was amazing as well. and I actually miss typing with it at times. it was very fast.
I had the Nokia N95 BTW. Its a fantastic phone. I don’t know what magic they did to run Half-Life, to run the game on that phone. … reading the article further, ahh, its no emulation. They have an unofficial Open Source engine that is compatible with the engine used in Half-Life to build a native version.
Makes me wonder what age of PC modern phones compare to. Shame that it’s often a pain to get Linux on them
I’d say about now, maybe just a few years behind. Phones come with 16gb of ram l, which is the most common config on steam. There are native ports on iOS. You can play resident evil 8 natively on an iPhone, you can emulate Cyberpunk 2077 on a high end Android.
I’d venture to say that any modern game could be ported to arm with very little compromise, and as arm laptops become more common this gap will be smaller and smaller. The biggest hit for running windows games on Android is having to translate x86 calls to arm calls, an arm windows binary would only have to run through proton which in some cases runs games better than windows itself.
With FEX, which Valve is pushing forward, I expect translating to arm explicitly isn’t going to be required soon. Pretty much everything will be able to run anywhere, as long as the hardware can handle it.
We just need the same thing for RISC-V, and then a push to that.
Depends on what you’re going for. But the a19 pro in the iPhone 17 is a legit beast compared to a few gen old laptop.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/18267048?baseline=18268036
The new MacBook Neo uses an A18 rather than an M series.
It’s all the same thing. Just higher or lower end. It’s like a pentium vs a core i
Why?
some people are bored so they just find a old device and try to run vidya on it?
Why not?
It wasn’t meant to do this in the first place!
Engineers are like wizards. Sometimes we get vaguely offended a thing does not exist, and then weird shit happens.
To paraphrase someone talking about why people climb mountains: Because it’s there.
Getting this game to run on a phone that was never intended to do so is the technological equivalent of climbing a mountain. It’s an interesting challenge, a neat way for someone to find an outlet for their skills and interests.
