In another far sighted editorial, Krisse looks at TV-out gaming on the Nokia N95, seeing how well a selection of top games work on the big screen and with the aid of a Bluetooth keyboard as controller. Of course, what's really needed is a Bluetooth joystick as well...
Read on in the full article.
I bought this for the N80 and now works for N95. Drivers are loaded on the phone and can emulate any button of sort. It is still a tad buggy and unresponsive in certain areas, but works quite well depending on which game.
Emulation rocks on this too. Much like playing the good ol' SNES or Megadrive directly into the TV..
Bchliu, I saw one of those on ebay but it didn't list any recent S60 phones on the compatibility list so I wasn't sure whether to mention it. If it's okay I'd love to know some more about that peripheral.
It works with S60 3rd Edition models then? How do you define the buttons, is there some kind of app you have to install on the phone? As it's bluetooth I assume you can use it at some distance from the phone, they don't have to be physically connected?
I suppose the one thing I'd worry about with that particular pad is a lack of buttons, phone games (including emulators) sometimes need the entire keypad to control them properly so it'd be safer to include the entire keypad on any phone-oriented bluetooth joypad. It would also let you handle phone calls from the sofa, which might be a nice bonus...
(I'm doing an article about emulation for this TV Out series, by the way.)
Good article. I tried out the System Rush demo with TV-out on my N93 when I got it, but the gameplay was quite disappointing. It was cool just seeing that TV-out worked so smoothly. Too bad there haven't really been any good games released that use the 3d hardware. Hopefully the situation will improve a lot when the new N-gage platform is released.
Krisse: This gamepad has got 6 main "fire" buttons, a select button and start button as well as the usual D-Pad controls (which also support Diagonals too unlike the main D-Pad of the N95).
This is enough for all the emulated machines (unless some genius ports a Playstation emu across).
The drivers also install an applet that allows you to assign buttons to whatever including the direction pad. This is useful especially when you play games in landscape.
I got it to play even about 5m away - although the sensitivity is still not up to scratch compared to a real cabled gamepad.
"Good article. I tried out the System Rush demo with TV-out on my N93 when I got it, but the gameplay was quite disappointing."
Yes, that's what I thought, but it's worth emphasising that this isn't a finished game, it's a 1-year-in-advance demo. Given their track record, I'm going to give the developers Ideaworks the benefit of the doubt and wait until the final game is released before passing judgement. All of their games on the N-Gage had decent gameplay and received good reviews, including the original System Rush.
"It was cool just seeing that TV-out worked so smoothly. Too bad there haven't really been any good games released that use the 3d hardware. Hopefully the situation will improve a lot when the new N-gage platform is released."
Yup, that's what I reckon. And if they did release a bluetooth joypad that would be the icing on the cake. Not everyone would use it, but the hardcore gamers (the kind of people who bought the original N-Gage) would probably be chuffed with such a peripheral.
The 3D hardware will also become more used in S60 games once it spreads to enough models. Perhaps it will become a standard feature of S60 phones in 2008 or 2009?
"This is enough for all the emulated machines"
Bchliu, thanks for the info. I was just thinking though, there are some games (TibiaME for example) that use the whole numbered gamepad, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Next Gen N-Gage releases also do too as the original N-Gage games did.
However, like you say, it sounds excellent for emulations where the original system only had a few buttons and a d-pad.
Good story.
And if you like to go even further with the mobile gaming, you should check the "human joystick" article at Forum Nokia blogs:
Enter to the next level of mobile gaming experience
That's the future, use your own body as a controller while your small mobile phone provides all the gaming features connected to big screen!
Global Race works fine in landscape on N93i by the way, so it's not a limitation of the game itself.
"Global Race works fine in landscape on N93i by the way, so it's not a limitation of the game itself."
It works from a technical standpoint, but the gameplay is spoilt by the huge speedometer. If you want to turn right, you can barely see where you're going.
It's not the fault of the game, it was only designed for horizontal mode on the E90 which has a much wider screen.