Note: this was supposed to post on January 1. Apparently Word Press had other ideas.
It’s somewhat common at this time of the year for bloggers to summarize the past, or to predict the future. Not me. I’m spending today recovering from last night, watching basketball, and probably playing Duke Nukem 3D on my phone. Yes, you heard me. The shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D is available for free on the N900 (the pay version is available too, although I assume you’ll need a license key of some kind to use it?).
It’s been years since I played DN3D. I remember it fondly: the alien violence, the arrogant voicing, the near-porn settings. What a great game for an adolescent. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, I think I just found it in a stack of disks we had. They probably came with the computer when we bought it second-hand. I’m not sure my parents ever knew about it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them.
Now DN3D has been available on other platforms in the past, but the N900 provides a unique mobile platform. First off, it DN3D runs natively, not on an emulator (e.g. DOSBox), allowing for speedy performance on the N900’s hardware. Secondly, the slide-out keyboard allows for true-to-the-original gameplay. Of course, there are some keys missing, so you’ll have to be a bit judicious in what functions you want available from the keyboard. The neat thing is that you can use the accelerometer and the proximity meter as input.
So how do you do this? You just need to enable the Maemo Extras-Devel repository.
- Open Application Manager
- From the drop-down, select “Application Catalogs”
- Click the “New” button
- Enter “Maemo Extras-Devel” as the catalog name
- Enter “http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/” as the web address
- Enter “fremantle” as the distribution
- Enter “free non-free” as the components