Notices

First i guess it would be important to compare the minimum specs of the game with what is avaiable in the N900 to see if under ideal circunstances a port would be playable.



Then we need to investigate the actual porting possibilities; has the engine been opensourced? Is there any opensource clone of the engine compatible with the original game files? Can we use 3D acceleration on the port? Can we adapt the inputs in the N900 to use with it (remaping physical keys to mouse buttons etc)? And so on.



I would love to play B&W on my N900, and wouldn't doubt others would as well.

That doesn't sound too high, does anything there catches your eye as presenting a big challenge?

The fact that, at last check, it's closed source. So you'd be forced to emulate x86 on ARM. So it'd be amazing if you could get it to so much as start, let alone run playably fast.

How much worse the performance under qemu in the N900 would be comparable to the real hardware described there?

Significantly worse. See this video of Win95 running on the N900. Notice how the elements redraw very slowly.

Now imagine trying to emulate something trying to do way, way more than simple 2D drawing. There would be a remote chance if the source were available, however I'm not aware of it ever having been released OR reimplemented.

I imagine it wouldn't be running a full Win95 install, just a barebones liveCD like install, perhaps even just the underlying DOS and a few additional things.

Btw, hardware acceleration can't be used with qemu?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfcEsJc74Qs Doesn't look all that bad, i don't think it is even using hardware acceleration...

Even if you got it running -- which would be awesome -- you'd never be able to actually play the game in the later levels on such a small screen; selecting your followers quickly would be just impossible. Plus you really need a two button mouse with a scroll wheel to get anywhere.

Great idea in theory though

Regarding the mouse buttons (scrollwheels are nothing more than two buttons that get flicked every fraction of a turn in one or the other direction), just remap the mouse buttons to the physical keyboard keys.


Regarding screen size, what resolutions were avaiable back then? I don't don't think it's gonna be too much of an issue, though you might have to play using bigger zoom than you normally would in a 15in CRT...

scroll wheel is mostly used for zooming if I remember correctly. It should be mapped to volume keys.

Device accelerometer (tilts) should be (optionally) mapped to viewpoint rotations (horiz and vert).