Having already seen the SNES with Wiimote via wifi video I am very intrigued about the gaming possibilities with the N900. The most important thing when it comes to mobile gaming, in my opinion, is the method of control.

Unfortunately the N900 has a somewhat hardware limited keyboard (3 row, no dpad)

So I had a couple questions:

Would it be feasible to find a way to remap the keyboard so that if you were to say lock on the fn (ctrl) it would allow the letters wasd to serve as a d pad or waxd and some of the buttons on the right to serve as the abxy or w/e?

Or is it possible that we might gain access to fully functioned bluetooth controllers?

Or would it be possible for some sort of hardware device which could clip on the back of the N900 and provide shoulder buttons as well as face buttons/joystick or dpad and interface via the usb?

Sorry just brainstorming, now that there is an open source phone that is graphically capable

I find it to be unacceptable that the N900 doesn't have a three inch arcade joystick attached to it somewhere.

Well n900 can have joystick.... I think

make it work gentlemen!!!! We have the technology!

The first thing I'm going to do with my N900 is rip out the keyboard and solder this piece of hardware on it.

I think this will down to the specific applications (i.e. emulators or games). I certainly hope most gaming apps will allow keyboard remapping.

Of course, why wouldn't emulators and most games allow you to change the keys. No need for a symlock.

The keypad should work just fine as a controller, the only downside is that without a d-pad and with only using thumbs, you can't really walk diagonally by pressing two keys at once, at least not to the upper left and upper right (unless the game uses some clever control scheme which splits up horizontal from vertical movements to each side of the keypad).

For most emulated platformers or RPGs it should be no issue at all. Custom games will come up with smart control schemes, probably involving the accelerometer in most cases. And if you need more, you will certainly be able to connect external controllers in various ways.

I have here a Zeemote from my N95. It is very nice to use and it is connected over Bluetooth. So we need only a good driver. ;-)

one upsiide to the controls is that the keys are on a perfect grid on the n900 opposed to a normal keyboard. maks it easier to control in my oppinion

It would be ace if we could have aplication specific maps.

For controlling purposes of my SNES-emulator on Asus EeePC i'm using this USB-controller:

I wish i had one of these though, they're much prettier For a controller like this, the Maemo device would need to be an USB host, which might or might not be possible with N900.