alt.hn

6/8/2026 at 9:02:01 PM

Developer Gets Half-Life Running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

 https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/developer-gets-half-life-running-at-30-fps-on-a-2007-nokia-n95

by ljf

6/8/2026 at 9:09:48 PM

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.

by ljf

6/8/2026 at 10:36:37 PM

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.

by app134

6/8/2026 at 11:29:34 PM

> 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.

by jamesfinlayson

6/8/2026 at 11:50:45 PM

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.

by jamesfinlayson

6/9/2026 at 3:33:52 AM

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

by skotobaza

6/9/2026 at 4:48:01 AM

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).

by jamesfinlayson

6/9/2026 at 9:21:45 AM

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

by DenisDolya

6/8/2026 at 10:51:41 PM

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.

by kotaKat