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Nokia S60 Emulator Run-Down

Thanks to the new generation of powerful phones, emulators have gone mobile. We have the full report...

[Editorial Note: Modojo strives to cover all things handheld, and that includes emulators. That being said we strongly encourage readers to actually BUY their games, or else we'll be out of jobs. And you'll be out a hobby. Don't emulate what you can still find in stores, kids.]

Recently, I found myself investing in a new phone. I searched far and wide for a mobile that would do email and web browsing without being too bulky. After much research, I settled upon the Nokia E61 (Available as the E62 in America I believe). After dancing around my room yelping at the wonder of being able to browse the internet quite reasonably in my hand I started on the real work. What GAMES could I cram onto the device. Now being a tightwad, I naturally thought "what can I get for FREE?". So off to the websites I went again. Now the E61 and many new Nokia phones have quite unbelievably large screens, some of them in landscape orientation too. This makes them ideal for running emulators I thought, so I decided to snoop around and see what I could find. It turns out there's an entire goldmine out there!

The latest Nokia phones run on the same S60 platform as previous phones, but have been upgraded to 3rd edition status. New features like larger screens, faster processors and the ability to press more than one button at the same time, woah!

Many of the major games platforms of the past are emulated very well, if not quite perfectly on s60. The impressive thing though is that most of these amazing little applications are the work of individuals. It appears that emulators for ancient home computers tend to be free. Console emulators, though, usually require a small payment to be made. You can get a good idea of how well your phone will be able to handle it through trial editions, either time limited or with constant BUY ME messages.

Marat Fayzullin (http://fms.komkon.org/EmuSymbian/)

The man with the most emulators to his name is one Marat Fayzullin, a jobbing computer scientist, who in his spare time put together some of the first emulators on PCs. He's created emulators for the Game Boy (Virtual Game Boy), Game Boy Advance (Virtual Game Boy... Advance!), The NES (iNes), The ColecoVision (ColEm), An emulator that deals with Sega Master System and Game Gear games (MasterGear) and an Emulator for an old British home computer, the ZX Spectrum (Speccy). The Nintendo and Sega emulators work really well, but they're ones you have to stump up money for. The ColecoVision, for you young'uns was an early 80's console, designed to trump the then dominant Atari VCS system, which it did with some pretty decent titles. Just a shame that the videogame industry vanished up its own rear around that time.

The ZX Spectrum was a stupendously popular machine around Europe during the 80's. There are many games you'll recognize, they just might have slightly odd, copyright dodging names. There was also a load of official arcade conversions too, which can be interesting to explore. More importantly though, FREE! Plus, with the advent of these phones that have full keyboards, being able to emulate an old 8-bit home computer, perfectly, in the palm of your hand can be quite a novel experience, and I don't mean just getting it to print swearwords all over the screen.

Vampent (http://www.vampent.com/)

The guys at Vampent have released a pair of Nintendo emulators, one for the NES and one for the SNES. They're remarkably polished affairs, The NES emulator doing a spot on job albeit with a slower frame rate than a real NES (same goes for iNes though). The SNES emulator, known as Vsun, is a similar affair but comes in two different versions. Vsun is the normal emulator, which from my experience can be a little on the slow side. Then there's Vsun Plus, which is the optimized for speed version. Games run a lot smoother on Vsun plus but they're lacking sound. Which to me is a smart trade off, as when your game's running slowly, who wants to hear jittery, broken sound anyway?

ScummVM

Now we've touched upon ScummVM on the DS but it's available on S60 as well as many other mobile platforms. It suffers on smaller screened phones but on the newer, larger screened phones you can see the games as they were intended. Certainly excellent for those of you who love pointing and clicking in your adventures.

Picodrive (http://www.zpmode.org/picodrive/)

Picodrive is a superb Genesis/Megadrive emulator, currently for s60 2nd edition. Written by the mysterious-sounding "AnotherGuest", the accuracy of its emulation is great. The only downside is it currently doesn't work on the newer s60 3rd edition phones. The author is working on it and hopes to release it soon. The website hasn't been updated for a long time but a little rooting around on Google yields activity on forums. So, Streets of Rage? On my phone? HECK YEAH!?

EEMAME (http://www.harmonicode.com/EEMame/)

One of the most impressive feats of emulation is the porting of MAME across to the s60 platform. We've seen various incarnations of it over the years and while still limited to a smaller selection of the full MAME rom list, what it can emulate will certainly raise a few eyebrows among you. EEMAME is currently the work of Staffan Ulfberg, based on an older Symbian port, EMAME. This version works well with a rather large portion of the MAME rom list, totalling 1321 games as of now, including the likes of Donkey Kong, Rush'n'Attack (a personal favorite), Ghosts'n'Goblins, Joust and countless others. It looks like the technological cut off point is somewhere in the late 80's. A fair few of the games struggle a bit on my phone but we may see some improvements over time from our hard working coder friends.

FRODO (http://koti.mbnet.fi/haviital/)

Frodo, by Hannu Viitala, is an emulator for the classic Commodore C64 home computer of the 80's. There are again a whole host of games from both America and Europe, where it had a longer life and we saw some more advanced games. Now seeing as most C64 games used the simple 1 button joystick scheme of things, the Frodo emulator works very well on a whole host of S60 Nokias. Especially well on the N-Gage. The only problem being the horizontally squished portrait nature of the screen. The developer is working on an all-new version for the S60 3rd edition phones, with keyboard functionality and landscape screen mode. Personally I can't wait! I'll have to though, as the pre-release version of the game is only being sent out to people who've helped support his efforts by making a donation.

DOOM! (http://koti.mbnet.fi/mertama/index_new.html)

Technically not an emulator, C2Doom is a port of the good old Doom engine for your s60 3rd edition (or s60 2nd, s80 or s90) phone. The core version of the game is free! A small donation is required though if you want to play more than just the original shareware levels. The direction stick controls your turning and moving back and forth, the face buttons controlling firing, strafing and weapon select. My phones inability to do diagonals means i seem to spend a lot of time strafing and turning, which adds an interesting new.... spin! to Doom. The reproduction of the Doom engine is spot on, the only issue I can see is the occasional sound glitches. It's just plain awesome hearing the Doom midi tunes issuing forth from your handset.

So, the upshot of all this is that even if you're caught short without a handheld, it's possible to cram an entire wealth of goodies into your phone. So you