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Symbian emulation has taken off

stranno

stranno

Member
EKA2L1 emulator has made amazing progress in the latest days and some SymbianOS 9.3 (S60v3) and SymbianOS 9.4 (S60 5th Edition) games work fine already.

Creebies (S60 5th Edition).



Tomb Raider: Legend (S60v3).



Brother in Arms 3D (S60v3).

6yMM2cD.png


7 Days (S60v3).

arQzHoa.png


Worms World Party should be also playable in the latest build.

N-Gage (SymbianOS 6.0) is not the focus of this emulator right now, but it could come in the future. There's another project for N-Gage but dont expect anything playable soon.

github.com

GitHub - EKA2L1/EKA2L1: A Symbian OS/N-Gage emulator

A Symbian OS/N-Gage emulator. Contribute to EKA2L1/EKA2L1 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
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Pretty surprising to see, but that's great for preservation. I know Nokia used to use this OS before the big sell off, which is where I mostly know it from.
 
Tekkie said:
Pretty surprising to see, but that's great for preservation. I know Nokia used to use this OS before the big sell off, which is where I mostly know it from.
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Back when I was at uta.fi (yeah, it redirects now, it used to be a separate uni) studying CS, there was a course on "mobile programming". This was in the early 2000s mind you, and in Finland at that, so the curriculum may seem odd nowadays. But basically, the course was divided into two sections, first J2ME and then Symbian.

The J2ME bit was elementary if you had even cursory understanding of Java - sure, there were some serious limitations (the MIDP 1.0 spec didn't include floating-point hardware FFS), but generally it was manageable. And then came Symbian. I think I tried to take that course three times, and all of them ended up with "fuck this" when it came to Symbian. Partially it is understandable - the OS was designed to run on hardware seriously deprived of both processing power and memory. And it was conceived before C++ was standardized in any meaningful fashion. But oh man, it was/is such an incomprehensible mess that it's no wonder Nokia went tits up. Qt would have been a great alternative for app development, and Maemo/Meego too for an OS. Alas...
 
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Interesting

Does have good games? I never played anything on Nokie besides Snake and the sh'mup game
 
rykomatsu said:
The sex toy is older than the mobile OS...by about 10-15 years.
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True, but the Symbian OS is now discontinued, so it's not something that's really uttered in the tech world outside of nostalgia pieces and preservation efforts, so there's no reason anyone born after 2005 would have any idea what it is. (Unless they were into retro tech.)
 
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God this takes me back.

The Nokia 6620 was my first smartphone as a kid. Got it imported from the US and everything, was blown away by its capability at the time.

Great times.
 
nowhat said:
Back when I was at uta.fi (yeah, it redirects now, it used to be a separate uni) studying CS, there was a course on "mobile programming". This was in the early 2000s mind you, and in Finland at that, so the curriculum may seem odd nowadays. But basically, the course was divided into two sections, first J2ME and then Symbian.

The J2ME bit was elementary if you had even cursory understanding of Java - sure, there were some serious limitations (the MIDP 1.0 spec didn't include floating-point hardware FFS), but generally it was manageable. And then came Symbian. I think I tried to take that course three times, and all of them ended up with "fuck this" when it came to Symbian. Partially it is understandable - the OS was designed to run on hardware seriously deprived of both processing power and memory. And it was conceived before C++ was standardized in any meaningful fashion. But oh man, it was/is such an incomprehensible mess that it's no wonder Nokia went tits up. Qt would have been a great alternative for app development, and Maemo/Meego too for an OS. Alas...
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Maemo was nice I had a N900 overclocked and undervolted. Meego was so closed and dumbed down in comparison.

Symbian even had a flavor(S90) for touchscreen phones already in 2003, Nokia released 1 phone with it in 2004, but after weak sales they killed it and touch was only brought back to Symbian after the success of iPhone.
 
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NOLA_Gaffer said:
True, but the Symbian OS is now discontinued, so it's not something that's really uttered in the tech world outside of nostalgia pieces and preservation efforts, so there's no reason anyone born after 2005 would have any idea what it is. (Unless they were into retro tech.)
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I don't follow what you're on about.
Someone born after 2005 wouldn't know about this defunct OS and therefore only know about the sex toy.
So therefore everyone born before 2005 knows about both?
 
PropellerEar said:
Maemo was nice I had a N900 overclocked and undervolted.
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Oh yeah, had one too. Still do as a matter of fact, not sure if it works anymore though. But it was tons of fun SSHing into my desktop and running xmms and the like with X forwarding on my phone. Utterly pointless too, but still cool in a very much geeky way.
 
no N-Gage emulation is disappointing.
that would be the really interesting one IMO.
the N-Gage had a few cool exclusive games and special conversions that are on no other system and are pretty neat.

like King of Fighters for example or a really interesting conversation of Red Faction
 
Was curious to see if this could possibly be about my old friend, was surprised to see it was, and now I will have nightmares.


nowhat said:
And then came Symbian. I think I tried to take that course three times, and all of them ended up with "fuck this" when it came to Symbian. Partially it is understandable - the OS was designed to run on hardware seriously deprived of both processing power and memory. And it was conceived before C++ was standardized in any meaningful fashion. But oh man, it was/is such an incomprehensible mess
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I had to develop for it. People who started recently, developing on anything mobile have no idea what monstrosities came before. ((Shudders))

That being said, I still accomplished what I needed to, but oh the struggles. Other avenues weren't much prettier. The world literally changed when iPhone came out, followed by Android.
 
TLZ said:
But does it run 90s Snake?
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Nokia 7650 (SymbianOS 6) was the first Symbian phone ever released, back in July 2002. And it isnt even the focus of this emulator, SymbianOS 9.3 came out around 2005-2006, and the first Symbian 9.4 (touch OS) was the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music.

I think Nokia 3310 Snake doesnt even run on Java.

01011001 said:
no N-Gage emulation is disappointing.
that would be the really interesting one IMO.
the N-Gage had a few cool exclusive games and special conversions that are on no other system and are pretty neat.

like King of Fighters for example or a really interesting conversation of Red Faction
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Yep, N-Gage emulation would be amazing. There are some really cool exclusives, like that Red Faction or Glimmerati. Even Call of Duty, the slowest FPS I've ever seen (by far).
 
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Aaaah, Nokia Ngage and not the Sex toy...lame. Not because the sex toy emulation would be awesome but because Ngage was crap even when it was new. Portrait aspect ratio, lol
 
Nice, Symbian had a few games of interest and decent 3D on a phone (for the time; decent enough that if a game had good enough play, the graphics wouldn't stop you, though I don't know if any game truly measures up to being worth your time today). There was a version of Pandemonium (though iOS has that too now,) there was RE Degeneration (also on iPhone), 7 Days:Salvation was said to be good, that fighter The One, an Assassin's Creed and a PoP (I think both were ports of the DS games?), a few Spider-Man games, a PGR, and some indie stuff at a hungry time for up-and-comers. Again, anything worth playing now, I'm not sure, but a new emulation scene is always interesting.

I was wondering if this was finally the way I'd be playing God of War Betrayal, but that was J2ME (and apparently possible to get, but there's no clear path without shaky web links...)

01011001 said:
no N-Gage emulation is disappointing.
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That seems like a logical step, right? From what I'm reading from a previous and failed N-Gage emulation attempt, the chipset for N-Gage isn't custom so much as high-spec, though the OS kernals are not the same as EKA2L1 's scope so it's not a straight route up towards it.

Makes me curious what the status of Gizmondo (a wonk WinCE device) emulation is...
 
CamHostage said:
That seems like a logical step, right? From what I'm reading from a previous and failed N-Gage emulation attempt, the chipset for N-Gage isn't custom so much as high-spec, though the OS kernals are not the same as EKA2L1 's scope so it's not a straight route up towards it.

Makes me curious what the status of Gizmondo (a wonk WinCE device) emulation is...
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It should be exactly the same of Nokia 6600 or 6630 (+graphics libraries, I guess). Only ~6 games of the entire N-Gage catalog dont work on 6600, the other games work out-of-the-box or using some weird fixes (Ashen requires to make a call in order the fix the colors, lol).

Gizmondo was a really cool device. It had the first augmented reality game I have ever seen in my life. 2006 and it works 10 times better than the Google Augmented Reality Engine for mobile (the Minecraft World thing).

 
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Interesting, there already exists quite a bit of emulators for J2ME/ME games, but i guess since not every mobile game of the era (just the majority) made use of the API, a full blown OS emulator is certainly a nice thing.
 
Kadve said:
Interesting, there already exists quite a bit of emulators for J2ME/ME games, but i guess since not every mobile game of the era (just the majority) made use of the API, a full blown OS emulator is certainly a nice thing.
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Java ME emulation didnt really took of until recent times too. KEmulator is really obsolete compared to J2ME-Loader, also developed by Nikita Shakarun. There's even a Mascot Capsule branch nowdays.
 
This is great for preservation, but if my time spent with a Nokia N8 taught me anything...it was that Symbian was not that great for games. That phone was great for media, but it was useless for games.
 
Kharnivore2099 said:
This is great for preservation, but if my time spent with a Nokia N8 taught me anything...it was that Symbian was not that great for games. That phone was great for media, but it was useless for games.
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Symbian or BREW were just necessary, since they are like 10x faster than Java ME games, that ran under a virtual machine, while these games ran directly in hardware.

Just compare any N-Gage or N-Gage 2.0 game with any Java JSR184 game. They were generations ahead.
 
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