Games worth emulating?
 

We all have emulators, and thousands of games. Most games are not worth playing even once, and are better off dead. But there are some games worth playing. Some of them are old and can be emulated. What are they?

Four out of five stars is, in my opinion, the minimum to make the list. Since we could fill the rest of our lives with only four to five star entertainment I see no reason to lower the bar. They don't have to be run-able on the tablet, just easily emulated.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I think there are hundreds of great games out of the thousands of roms, but see your point.

Still, I would be happy with the same emulators on Android. The emulators on that device and have better compatability rates than any other platform for phones. If Droid had a better KB or d-pad it would be an instant defacto old school game system.

Non console games or emus I would like to see ported to N900

Duke Nukem'
Quake 2
MDK
MAME
Raiden 2
Unreal Tounament
Amiga 500

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I would like Pac-Man.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Me too - I'd like Arkanoid as well. The complex games are just too demanding for me on a smaller screen.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

It shouldn't be too hard to port some clone of Pac-Man to Maemo. At least there's Kapman for KDE Desktop written in Qt. It would be cool to modify it to use accelerometer as the game control so you'd control it by turning the device.

Sadly I don't currently have time to do this :( But if someone starts a project on this, I'll be happy to join and help as much as I can.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I did a search for "best games ever" a while ago to see what might be worth working on. After going through a page where someone had painstakingly compiled dozens of published top 10 lists and then produced a meta top 10 list, I concluded that emulators and (legally obtained, of course!) ROMs should be able to cover most of what was worthwhile in past games. It saddened me a little because i've never been much of a console gamer. Anything good on computers that didn't become obsolete for whatever reason went to consoles, and the big console franchises (Zelda and Mario mostly) were runaway successes that generally never came to computers.

Of the classics that started life as computer games, most are either older and could be run on an emulator and/or have open source versions, or are closed and not really practical to bring to N900, but with some similar competitors that can be.

Examples of the first case are Civ ("Freeciv" is available for OS2008 and the maintainer is an active participant on Maemo.org), Starcontrol (i've got uqm in extras-devel and just contributed an upstream patch to make it behave nicely in the background so it can be moved to testing soon) and all the classic adventure games and like the Sierra classics that run on the SCUMMVM. I was looking at Archon (coincidentally another game by the same guys that brought us Starcon a few years later), but apparently it has been recently been licensed and a commercial version released for iPhone, so that's probably going to come if Maemo catches on. Many, many more games can be played through a Commodore emulator or Dosbox.

Of the latter type, Starcraft and UT are not open, but similar games like Quake III and Widelands have already been ported or are in the process. I'm not sure if that leaves anything out that could reasonably be brought to Maemo.

What does that leave us with?

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Personally on a phone, I like simple pickup-play-setdown games that you can easily pause and resume (possibly with a minute/hour break in between). That said, here are my suggestions.

Tetris
Frozen Bubble
Non time based Puzzle Games (ex. Sudoku, Mah Jong, Card Games, etc)
Turn Based Games

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Well don't forget Flandry that the computer version of the game is going to be more mouse friendly. Kind of sucks to play a game on the SNES emulator that has a pointer, but you have to use the directional pad.

...so to summarize: Amgia 500 emulator please. :D
UAE already has an Arm port, which debian.org builds. UAE can sometimes take some serious CPU time though, so I'm not sure how well it really work.

(of course, dosbox is pretty cool as well, though often dos games didn't have a mouse either).

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Give me some specific game titles regardless of whether they'll work on maemo. I want someone to type "Great old games" into google, wind up here and go "wow google really works."

That's why I posted in off topic. ;)

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

There was this game which was generally physical (i.e. was on object, not a software). There was a ball you had to take to a goal through a maze by tilting the thing. Played a version in iphone that used the accelerometer and it was awesome
I don't know the name though

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

If FreeCiv will be emulated, how about the Colonization version FreeCol (or equivalent?). I think I've seen some posts about OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe).

A game that is perfect for a handheld device is Puzzle Bobble (which I used to play on my SE W810, a Java port) and Pipemania (MAME would cater for these). Puzzle games such as Bejeweled, Tetris type games, Word Twist, Sudokou, Othello are perfect for these platforms. Another one I used to play on my SE K800 was a Java game called Absolute Puzzle. It had 3 puzzle games in 1 and was quite good. Simple and quick.

A great simple strategy game on the Amiga was Mega Lo Mania .. that would be great to see again. Then there are the old Championship Manager games that would be great. For some action, things like Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and Shinobi would be great too (the latter via MAME probably and the first 2 via an Amiga emulator).

For more modern games, I'd think of the typical cardgames. I used to play a Blackjack trainer everyday as well as a Texas Hold Em King.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I want pong! (The original, or something like it. :))

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

A Java emulator or support for J2ME (?) would be great to run all the Java games that are already out there. The difficulty will be controls and fitting them onto a much higher resolution screen.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Sounds like Marble Madness or similar.

There was a simple one I played on someone's iPhone where it was like a "spider-man" web-slinging. You tap to initiate the swing, then tap again to release and land on a platform or fall to your death.

I've even seen someone with a Numpty Physics clone after I introduced them to it on my PC..!

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I am not interested in updating freeciv, so if anybody wants to do it... I'd like to see GTK version, but its much more work :)

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

My grandparents have one of those. It was ridiculously hard. I think it was simply called "Marble Maze" but yeah Marble Madness would be the drug trip virtual version.

I imagine we'll see a program imitating that game on Maemo. BTW, the game demonstrated at the Summit was a similar premise to Marble Madness.

Any particular reason? I'd like to see it available so i will take a look when i get a chance. Could you please tell me what you changed for your port?

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

The Maze of Galious was fun
http://www.braingames.getput.com/mog/

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

MAME is the best emulator for Arcade game.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

True.
It's great, is there a Tab button to bring up the in-game menu?
Shooting games like Operation Wolf and Police Trainer could be potentially easy if the stylus can be used.

Elite Beat Agents (on Nintendo DS) would be a great touchscreen game for the N900.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Thdre is a seperate thread for Java.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I haven't seen anyone mention Elite. That was a classic game. I had something similar on my Palm V years ago that worked so any of the tablets should be able to eat it. Combine that with Accelerometer control for flying in the space sequences and you'll have a very interesting twist on the original.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Jagged Alliance 2 would be nice. Apparently it already runs on NX0 so I suppose it would be relatively straightforward to get it running also on N900.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=16138

I think that JA2 would be quite an optimal game for N900: a turn based strategy game that does not have too complicated controls.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

final fantasy 7

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I have enough to do without freeciv, and I really don't play it. I don't remember what the changes are but they can be reviewed from the source package.

This thread should be moved to Games section.

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

What platform was that?

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

I had that on the BBC way back when.
How would it be useful to use the accelerometer? If you are on the train waving the phone about you can't actually see where you're going.

Anyone remember the ECM system ? ;)

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Well I remember in the late 70's to mid 80's the games I saw a lot in arcades were
Joust (landscape)
Dig Dug (portrait)
Stargate (landscape)
Centipede (portrait) bluetooth trackball maybe
Tempest - bluetooth trackwheel
I'll edit this post later.
Galaga

Re: Games worth emulating?
 

Ah, the arcade immortals. How about some screenshots? You're in luck--i just took these today.

http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php...1&d=1263180587