Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

230 points by ljf 3 days ago

https://twitter.com/dante_leoncini/status/206303501506830790...

I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747

Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...

Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!

I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95.

https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.

ndiddy - 10 hours ago

What is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.
- jkestner - 5 hours ago
  
  Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS - an hour ago
    
    I was big into dumbphones about 10-15 years ago and the problem with dumbphones is the same problem with dumbtv and other ones, is that the market is already small, and those in the market for these things are opinionated as shit about the specific configuration they want. So you are presented probably with maybe 2, 3 viable options if you are lucky, none are the thing that satisfies your actual needs, and they are all overpriced as shit because they have no competition because the market is so niche. So you probably end up buying the closest configuration possible to what you want and then spend your experience being slightly annoyed that it’s not fully there.
  - ricardonunez - 2 hours ago
    
    Have you checked the fair phone?
    
    jkestner - an hour ago
    
    I don’t want the rat race of modern smartphones. I want an appliance.
- numpad0 - 5 hours ago
  
  It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.
- kotaKat - 9 hours ago
  
  fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.
  OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
  I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
  EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
  - lxgr - 5 hours ago
    
    SIP over Wi-Fi was so amazing on Symbian. Free international phone calls over Eduroam long before mobile Skype was a thing!
  - Melatonic - 8 hours ago
    
    That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?
    There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons
  - rahimnathwani - 8 hours ago
    
    802.11b/g :(
    
    lxgr - 5 hours ago
    
    Live a little, allow horribly inefficient delightful retro device clients on a 2.4 GHz channel :)
    WEP is where I’d personally draw the line, but the N95 fortunately supports WPA.
    
    vitally3643 - 5 hours ago
    
    54Mbps is enough for anyone!
    
    - 3 hours ago
    
    [deleted]
    
    joe_mamba - 5 hours ago
    
    My powerful Android tablet is limited to 72mbps link due to a quirk with the way the XDA developer implemented wifi support on the lineageos branch of my tablet, meaning the device can't see the region specific 5ghz band of the modem of my ISP is outputting, so it can only connect to the 2,4ghz band of that SSID meaning it's stuck to 72mbps.
    And despite this, it works ok for what I used it: Brave web browsing, youtube via newpipe, Plex and Jellyfin streaming.
    Like I'm bummed I don't get the Gigabit and Wifi 6 speeds of the router and my internet plan is theoretically capable of, but somehow 72mbps seems sufficient in most of my use cases of that device so .. yay advanced video codecs I guess!?.
  - mschuster91 - 6 hours ago
    
    > OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
    Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.
- - 6 hours ago
  
  [deleted]
ge96 - 10 hours ago

N900 was a crazy phone, ahead of its time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU
At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it
- geoffeg - 8 hours ago
  
  I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.
  - ryukafalz - 7 hours ago
    
    This with DisplayPort Alt-Mode so it can be docked for desktop use is pretty much my dream device.
  - burnte - 7 hours ago
    
    I'd buy an N810 formfactor right now with modern guts.
  - vablings - 6 hours ago
    
    Not ARM but checkout the PinePhone, its also pretty much sold at cost (same as most Pine products)
    
    ge96 - an hour ago
    
    Funny I was a supporter of their devices I bought both phones, laptop, tablets... Issue is the software man no drivers. Like the e-ink tablet had a great design/screen but the brush stroke was ass would leave dotted lines as you drew then it would render solid on lift up.
    I'm complaining even though I'm not writing the drivers myself I get that.
    
    geoffeg - 4 hours ago
    
    The Pine Phone is cool, but the slide out keyboard on the N900/N810 was a big selling point for me.
    
    lxgr - 5 hours ago
    
    Doesn’t it use an ARM CPU?
    
    yjftsjthsd-h - 2 hours ago
    
    Yes; https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone#Specifications lists an Allwinner A64
  - ge96 - 7 hours ago
    
    Funny I tried to buy one of those breakout blackberry keyboards but they were sold out everywhere
- Maxion - 9 hours ago
  
  Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol
realityfactchex - 8 hours ago

> They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s
As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.
YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.
- burnte - 7 hours ago
  
  I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.

jonhohle - 3 hours ago

This makes me sad. Not that this work was done, it’s incredible, but that we’ve fallen so far from what was possible on meager hardware. Now everyone has a super computer in Their pocket that feel slow.

jamesfinlayson - 3 days ago

Impressive.

Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.

skotobaza - 3 days ago

There is an open Half-Life 1 SDK on Valve's GitHub [1], not sure if it's missing something regarding the engine.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife
- jamesfinlayson - 3 days ago
  
  Yeah that's just the game logic which has been out since 1999. The rendering/networking/animation/UI/sound etc stuff is all still closed source (though apparently there is a leak from a Counter-Strike Online developer circulating among private hands - some code was contributed to Xash3D which perfectly implemented a non-trivial scripting system which was suspicious enough that it was removed).
  - Fr0styMatt88 - an hour ago
    
    There was also the very early leak/theft of the Half-Life 2 beta source (https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_leak)
  - WorldMaker - 8 hours ago
    
    Isn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it.
    I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.
    
    mewse-hn - 7 hours ago
    
    Maybe.. kind of.
    The Doom source code was originally released under a non-commercial license that was weirdly restrictive and it was eventually re-released under GPL. The Quake source code was released under GPL from the beginning.
    If Valve really wanted to release HL1/GoldSrc source code, they could re-base to the GPL quake source code and release their changes as GPL as well. This would be a miserable job because the remaining quake code is probably scattered across the codebase in weird orphaned fragments, but afaik it would be completely legal.
    e: oh yeah if the shambling zombie that is Sierra still holds any rights over HL1 then god knows what the IP situation is with that property
    
    ndiddy - 6 hours ago
    
    They bought the HL1 rights back from Sierra in the early 2000s. The real problem is that the code is not in a distributable state and nobody at Valve feels like working on putting it into a distributable state ( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/1712#issuec... ):
    > A while back Valve [had] a partner perforce server that had depots of the source files for both gold source and source that were shared with development partners and some mod teams. This server had a major meltdown and those depots were lost. At the time there was no requests and no activity around gold source development. Resources to rebuild the depots did not exist and still don't so that code is just not available. Once a year someone talks about maybe pulling it together to open source it but once again there are not resources to do the actual work need to package it up. The Sven Co-op team was luck in that there was a package and someone to make it available to them, that does not exist today.
    
    mepian - 4 hours ago
    
    Didn't Valve release a huge update to Half-Life in 2023 (i.e. 6 years after the linked comment was written)?
    
    jamesfinlayson - 4 hours ago
    
    Yeah they obviously still have the code. I think the important point there is server for partners - there is some things that licensees wouldn't get (uncompiled middlewares I'm guessing - they don't need to modify Bink/Miles/Havok etc).
    
    jamesfinlayson - 3 hours ago
    
    Maybe... although I think some non-id idTech 3 games have been open sourced since then.
  - redox99 - 9 hours ago
    
    What scripting system?
    
    jamesfinlayson - 4 hours ago
    
    The .seq files that Ritual introduced in Condition Zero Deleted Scenes.
inigyou - 10 hours ago

Everything's open source in the age of LLM-assisted Ghidra...
- jamesfinlayson - 4 hours ago
  
  I think Xash3D and ReHLDS are already most of the way there already.

stego-tech - 33 minutes ago

Holy sh*t Tom’s Hardware has gone downhill. Every advert snuck past both my Pi-Hole and my iOS filters, and it even tried forcing a file download on site open on my iPhone.

As for the HL1 port: I love it, always wanted an N95 (I had an N80ie that I loved), and these sorts of retro experiments are always a joy to read about.

donkers - 25 minutes ago

You might need to update your filters. Using AdGuard Pro on iOS I’m not seeing any ads.

p4bl0 - 7 hours ago

Oooh! I fondly remember my N95! Pictures and movies it took were great, at least for the time, and it had apps and a lot of stuffs like a browser that were presented as new on the phone space when the first iPhone was released, while I had my N95 for almost a year at this time. Symbian was a really nice system.

Cloudef - 4 hours ago

Symbian was really awful OS. Nokia's mistake was ignoring Maemo.
jkestner - 5 hours ago

And you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.

socalgal2 - 39 minutes ago

what if any games have you played lately that you considered similar to Half-Life (all cutscenes in game while you are 100% interactive and free to do whatever, including ignoring the NPC)

ljf - 3 days ago

To me the Nokia N95 was close to a perfect phone, only the E61 or 62 then the E72 could beat it, especially for the price at the time.

I still like to think of a parallel time line where Symbian actually had a good and usable app store, and developers had been supported.

app134 - 3 days ago

Teenage me would've killed for an N900 back in the day.
Went with an iPhone 3GS.
Still think about that from time to time. I don't regret it, per-se, as the jailbreak scene at the time was very exciting.
- tjoff - 10 hours ago
  
  N900 wasn't symbian, if that was what you implied.
  It ran Maemo 5, and I still miss it even though I never owned one myself. Unfortunately Nokia fumbled everything.
  - tosti - 6 hours ago
    
    And it was based on Debian. Installing an "app" was quite literally installing a deb package. Back in the day, I was working at a mobile software company and they had to call the IT guy (i.e. me) to explain how packaging works in Debian, just for the new Nokia they sent us, about a month before official launch. I tought the gadget was adorable.
jamesfinlayson - 3 days ago

> developers had been supported
Before my time but I remember an old colleague saying how hard it was to find decent documentation for Symbian development.
ezst - 10 hours ago

Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.

porphyra - 7 hours ago

Wild how back in the days, phone chips were 10 years behind PCs in performance, but now they are almost the same (in single-core performance, anyway).

itrunsdoomguy - 9 hours ago

I would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..

varispeed - 7 hours ago

I had this phone when it was released. I really loved it. But one thing I remember the most was using it as fidgeting toy. Just opening and closing it. So satisfying.

steadyw0 - 8 hours ago

Litteraly a phone out of his time

DenisDolya - 3 days ago

Now instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?

inigyou - 10 hours ago

Probably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?
- deniska - 10 hours ago
  
  Well, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs
  - Apocryphon - 7 hours ago
    
    Might as well skip to Crysis at this rate.

simonw - 9 hours ago

[dead]

bendndndn - 10 hours ago

[dead]

a3w - 10 hours ago

332 MHz Dual ARM 11 ?! Half-Life ran smooth in Pentium 100 single core.

Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.

andor - 9 hours ago

It doesn't have a dual CPU or dual-core CPU. It's one CPU core plus a DSP core (which is probably not used by the game).
Sharlin - 9 hours ago

Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.
- Narishma - 9 hours ago
  
  I played it back when it came out on a P166 in software mode and it was fine at that resolution.
  - HerbManic - 4 hours ago
    
    I did the same, I do wonder if it holds up as well as my memory remembers. Probably not.
    Like I remember Doom running fine on my 486 SX 25Mhz, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that great. It took a top end Pentium to really get it into smooth-ish 20fps+ territory.
system2 - 9 hours ago

Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.
- Johanx64 - 2 hours ago
  
  Pentium 1 133mhz ran Quake2 pretty darn well as long as you had hardware accel. Without hadware accel it was ass.
  (maybe even Pentium 100)
iberator - 10 hours ago

nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)
- Sharlin - 9 hours ago
  
  Yeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.
  - HerbManic - 4 hours ago
    
    Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.
    "My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"
    I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.
- rightbyte - 6 hours ago
  
  Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.
  - HerbManic - 4 hours ago
    
    With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.
    Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.