For the second post in this series about fantastic things developers have done with Symbian phones, I thought it was time for something a little more fun! Before the phenomenal success of Nintendo’s Wii, I was beginning to think that favouring gameplay over graphics must be a sign I was getting old. Early computer games had to focus on the gameplay because the hardware of the time really couldn’t do much with the graphics. Since the processing power and graphical capabilities of mobile computers tends to lag several years behind their desktop counterparts, many people have seen some classic games from years gone by as ideal for mobile platforms.
The oldest of these games are the early arcade machines, like Asteroids and Pac-Man. A group of arcade enthusiasts created the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to keep the old games alive. The code for MAME is publicly available and it was ported to Symbian devices very early on, starting with Symbian’s original incarnation as EPOC32 on the Psion Series 5. MAME has evolved over the years, and with it have come ports to more recent Symbian devices, right up to the current Nokia 5800XM port. Note: Some of the original arcade games have been released for free use with MAME, others have been re-sold commercially but many more are used without permission and cannot legally be redistributed while they remain in copyright.
Moving on to some fairly early PC games that translate well to the modern touch screen device, there were some excellent point-and-click adventure games such as the Monkey Island series and Day of the Tentacle. A popular open source project, the ScummVM, re-implements a large number of the engines that drove these games, allowing owners of the original game data files to play them on other platforms. For several years now, one of those platforms has been Symbian. Some of the games, like Beneath a Steel Sky (pictured above) have been released as freeware by the original developers.
If you want something that pushes the capabilities of your mobile device a little further, then perhaps the Quake series of games are for you? The source code to the Quake games was released by id Software and ported to Symbian by Olli Hinkka. Unfortunately you’ll need one of a very limited set of devices to play these games, as they are quite closely tied to the hardware for performance reasons. Olli has provided versions that can take advantage of hardware 3D graphics acceleration where it’s available – if you want to play Quake III Arena then you’ll need it!
Using the keypad of the device might not be ideal for controlling this type of game. There’s support for a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if you’ve got them in the latest game, but how about this for an alternative option – using accelerometers and TV-Out!
Tags: emulators, fun, Games, Open Source
