Pandemonium
 

As I paid for the n-gage pandemonium on the n97 and didn't finish the game, I wanted to carry on on the n900. It was released for win32, Playstation, Sega Saturn and n-gage. I've no idea about what n-gage is, but I'm guessing some ARM binary and ABI which the n-gage app provides to the various symbian phones it's available on. The ARM compatibility might help, but I decided this was a nonstarter.

The PSX emulation videos look slow, ~50% at best, so this is unlikely to ever work. The dosbox threads indicate some games seem okay on this, so I decided that as the game was so old for PC, (P200 era), there is a chance that the fast JIT based qemu might be able to run the x86 PC version fast enough.

I found that you can apparently run wine under the qemu user mode execution, so this needs somebody (maybe me if I find the time), to compile qemu in this mode rather than the full PC emulation modes (like dosbox) that people have been using so far. It should then be possible to run various windows apps under wine, albeit slowly. I'm hoping the 600Mhz ARM based processor could emulate an x86 fast enough for Pandemonium.

As a test of the feasibility of this project I used usbnet X forwarding of wine running the pandemonium demo for windows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOKTso0j72c

Re: Pandemonium
 

The N-Gage games were all Java. Pandemonium is an action platformer with a 2D gameplay style but done with 3D graphics and was quite fun for its time for those that haven't played or seen it before. It had a sequel that also hit on the PS1 which was just as good.

Wine does not run on anything other than X86 processors so it cannot be used.

Honestly, because of the fact that it's 3D... I really don't see you being able to play it on the N900 at any point.

Re: Pandemonium
 

It's software rendered, wine was happily using raw X11 to display, so not using anything fancy. You can run qemu-i386 wine notepad.exe
Somebody did this back in 2004 for PPC http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/...ne/014468.html

Re: Pandemonium
 

all n-gage 2.0 games was not java thats a myth and some was very good too.
ONE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0dU8...eature=related
System Rush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMgqCH6i3fw
bounce boing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR6WPddzkZo&
creatures of the deep http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKV1HE4VQQ&
there was lots more what was not java too that includes pandemonium

Re: Pandemonium
 

The original N-Gage (not the QD) had MIDP 1.0. With MIDP 1.0, 2D games looked shitty, not to mention that 3D games were damn near out of the question.

No, it ran Symbian 6.1 and it ran games made for Symbian 6.1.

And... I've missed the point here as the first post talks about the N-Gage platform that Nokia made for the N95 and other phones.

Re: Pandemonium
 

Well, I worked on N-Gage games and all the work was done in Java, so...

The performance on the N-Gage was terrible. Simply playing multiple sounds at the same time was pulling teeth.

Re: Pandemonium
 

nearly all 3rd part games was java and thats was killed the platform. they just ported standard rubbish, points finger at Glu EA and Gameloft

Re: Pandemonium
 

No, what killed the platform is the fact that N-Gage was a terrible gaming platform. It performed poorly, users hated it and developers (like myself) found it absolutely painful... so most developers had little choice but to go the Java route for something remotely decent... and the JVM was horrible, not completely broken like the Nokia 3650/7650 at least, but still bad.

When users are annoyed and developing for your platform is like having red hot nails poked through your eyelids, you aren't doing anything to make it a success. The QD fixed a lot of the issues, but by that time "N-Gage" was already severely tainted as a brand... and guess what? It still is.

Anyways, Pandemonium was one of my favorite games on the Playstation. You can always go out and buy a Playstation and the game for next to nothing. If you want to play it on the go, grab a PSP and buy the game from the Playstation Store. There's not really going to be any way to make it playable the way you remember it otherwise.

Re: Pandemonium
 

almost no 3rd party publisher made a game from scratch on n-gage 2.0 they just added online score boards and achievements to already available 2 year old java games like Dogs, brain challenge, asphalt 3, when other platforms was getting fifa 09 n-gage was only just getting fifa 08 with rankings and they wondered why sales bad
edit: i know the tools was bad and the certification process sucked so blame cant be all one way, they all killed it together

Re: Pandemonium
 

I've already said, this is most likely via qemu executed wine. The most likely things to fail will me my ability to find time to compile qemu, my ability to get it to build in the user running mode as I need, and the reasonable possibility that it'll be too slow.

Though you should note that X forwarding over ssh over usbnet is quite a bottle neck and that, as you can see from the video, wasn't that bad.

Re: Pandemonium
 

If you think wine executed via qemu will give you any usable performance then you will be terribly disappointed. It's not even very like that it'll work at all. It's a waste of time.

Re: Pandemonium
 

My tests so far show performance about equal to pentium 100 for raw execution, graphically stuff is using X and native system calls. So for example toppler runs at almost native speed!

I've used binfmt_misc to get it so I can just add x86 binaries to the path and they run as if they were arm linux binaries. This includes wine:

~/wine/usr/lib/wine $ file ../../bin/wine
../../bin/wine: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
~/wine/usr/lib/wine $ wine --version
qemu: Unsupported syscall: 240
wine-1.1.29
~/wine/usr/lib/wine $ /usr/bin/file /usr/bin/file
/usr/bin/file: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.17, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Unfortunately clone()/fork() don't work. I hope Pandemonium is win16 and a really old wine might work without crashing like this does when I run it against anything