Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

I've just done an editorial for Ovi Gaming on Maemo 5 and the N900, comparing them to Nokia's current Symbian devices from a gaming perspective:

http://www.ovigaming.com/news/item/1...emo_5_coul.php

The last sentence is very important, the presence of Maemo 5 is helping to make sure that everyone gets an upgrade, not just Maemo 5 users.

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

Agree! the price is bigest problem for Maemo phone. but N900 is good device for game app. other comments for your game development plan?

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

good article, my post from the comments:

"the n900 needs commercial apps/games to compete with the iphone, so the sooner nokia releases the Ovi store for its flagship mameo5 device the better.

there is also a fantastic synnergy to be exploited in that the new iphone, the Palm Pre, and the n900 all use the same Omap3 hardware platform, something which makes app/game porting far easier.

the n900 could literally reach for the stars by standing on the shoulders of the industry giant, after all, why would developers not port their wares provided there is a secure sales channel in which to increase their sales."

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

Actually, that's pretty much bogus. Hardware is just one aspect of the equation (and not even necessarily the most important). With the exception of OpenGL ES, it's actually easier to port something from a desktop x86 Linux to Maemo (or vice versa) than it is from the iPhone or Pre.

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

That's interesting, in the early days people often talked about the CPU type being the key thing for porting to work but I suppose people used things like machine code a lot more back then.

Has programming become so removed from the hardware that the hardware type no longer makes that much difference?

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

Today, the OS has an increasingly important role and the applications are less-and-less kingdoms of their own that do as they please. Also, with the complexity of games and power of HW increasing, low level programming is used less and less, except for some very critical routines if at all. Hence the limits of OSes (and their SDKs) are a much larger factor than hardware, with a very few notable exceptions (like OpenGL (ES) version, floating point support).

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

...so in a way modern applications are more like extensions of the OS rather than self-contained programs?


Yeah, that makes sense. Machine code seemed to be used the most on machines with the least resources, to squeeze every last drop of performance out.

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

Well, perhaps would be more correct to say they're more like regular apps. Meaning they make use of the libraries and functions present on a platform, and are not as keen on implementing everything from scratch themselves (as was pretty much necessary in the old days).

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

But since both Maemo and Palm WebOS are Linux based, and that the hw -wise are the same, it is fair to presume the basic apps, should work on both devices (apps that don't rely on specifics of both devices). This could be extended to iPhone as well, since it also uses (if I'm not mistaken) ELF executable file format. The other issue of course are libraries, or specific pieces of hw. If an application depends on such things, it is of course still possible to execute it on different device, but it's not that straightforward.

EDIT: It seems that Mac OS X uses a specific executable file format, which is not ABI compatible to ELF, which is used by Linux, so no iPhone could not run even the most basic apps that Maemo or WebOS run.

Re: Ovi Gaming article on what Maemo 5 means for games on Nokia devices
 

It's really not. The problem with both Android and webOS is that lock you into their respective userspaces since both Palm and Google decided to put together their own basically from scratch.

Nokia went the other direction and modified desktop libraries for use on a mobile device which is why it's reasonably straightforward to run regular Linux applications in Maemo and vice versa. The same is not true of either Android or webOS. For Android you need Davlik, for webOS you'd need a lot of hacking.