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Nokia N-Gage Cracked
According to Mr. Belvedere over at CD Freaks, the Nokia N-Gage has been cracked. From the article: "The games that were designed for the N-Gage will of course only work with the Nokia device but not anymore. Now that the security on the N-Gage has been cracked the games can be played on other mobile phones as well such as the Siemens SX1." The article notes that Sonic N is the only game seen in public yet, but others are sure to follow soon. It'll be interesting to see how Nokia handles this.
Nokia's N-Gage mobile gaming device has been cracked
Posted by Dennis on 11 November 2003 - 14:50 - Source: SPOnG.com
Mr. Belvedere, our Club CD Freaks Moderator, used our news submit to tell us that Nokia's N-Gage device has been cracked according to this information. The Nokia N-Gage device is primarily a handheld gaming device but it can also be used as an MP3 player, wireless browser and last but not least as a telephone.
The games that were designed for the N-Gage will of course only work with the Nokia device but not anymore. Now that the security on the N-Gage has been cracked the games can be played on other mobile phones as well such as the Siemens SX1:
Nokia will today be licking its wounds and doing a fair amount of worrying, with the revelation that the N-Gage's security has been cracked like an egg, with other manufacturers' handsets able to play the machine's software.
Specifically, the Siemens SX1 is already capable of running N-Gage games, with Sonic N being the only game seen in public, though it's expected that the others won't be too far behind.
This is expected to be the start of a process that will see third-party hardware add-on sales of devices that will enable many phones to simply suck up the N-Gage content, then go on their merry way.
Nokia's reaction to this new, seemingly unforeseen problem, will be interesting to observe, to say the least.
Some screenshots and video's of the Siemens SX1 mobile phone running the Nokia N-Gage games can be found on Club-Siemens. More information on the hacked N-Gage can be read here and here.
I presume this only concerns the "simple" J2ME games. Certainly other mobile phones lack hardware to run "big" N-Gage games like Tomb Raider, Pandemonium or Tony Hawk...? (I don't know for sure, the article is already shlashdotted, but Headline like this seems to be misleading.)
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
I believe that it uses a PIII with special BIOS. If the BIOS can't ensure that the disc is a valid XBox game, then it doesn't move past the POST.
I'm sure you can play an XBox game on a PC with the right loaded and drivers. How else would you develop for it.
http://www.club-siemens.net/preview/ngage/
Not true, most of the commercial games for mobile phones ARE coded with J2ME if we look at the ecosystem that the nGage lives in. There are games written in C/C++ as well and all of the games you buy at retail on carts are written in C, but the vast majority of content available is in J2ME.
There is a gameboy emulator for NGage (and indeed any other Series 60 phone).
http://www.wildpalm.co.uk/GoBoy7650.html
"We're aware of it and we're taking it seriously," Damian Stathonikos, spokesman for Nokia Mobile Phones, which is responsible for the N-Gage device, told Dow Jones Newswires.
Stathonikos said after a cursory look at the Web sites it wasn't clear that the claims being made about hackers cracking the protection was true. "Sometimes it's not 100% clear what they've done and if they've done what they say they have. The bark can be louder than the bite," he said.
Complete article here.
Eh? Because you only need to carry one device with you? I love being able to kill time by just doing daft things on my mobile, such as games, writing, eBooks, internet/e-mail.
I can think of worse ways to pass time when you are away from home and need to wait for something, e.g. a bus.
They must have put it back then. Either that or I'm seeing things.
No, you can't play XBox games on a standard PC. (At least not yet, probably never.)
When you develop on one you use Visual Studio with an XBox SDK coupled with a special developer edition of the XBox. (Which has special BIOS and 128MB RAM among other things.)
You can then execute code and debug code on the developer Xbox from you PC over the network. (And if you mod your XBox you can develop like this too.)
Here are some shots of Sonic running on the Siemens SX1.
here
Siemens SX1 plays:
Sonic
Tomb Raider
Puyo Pop
Pandemonium
Tony Hawk
Nokia 6600 plays:
Pandemonium
Puyo Pop
Sonic
Tomb Raider
Tony Hawk
(Puzzle Bubble fails)
Nokia 3650 plays:
Sonic
Puyo Pop
(everything else fails due to insufficient RAM)
Too bad you have to be an "authorized N-Gage developer" to program in C/C++. With all the competition in the market, they need all the help they can get.
From the source:
N-Gage(tm) supports two different game styles: downloadable titles and rich games distributed on MMC cards.
Downloadable titles for N-Gage are developed in Java(tm) MIDP in the same way and with the same tools used to develop downloadable games for any other Series 60 Platform device. You do not require authorization to develop downloadable games for any Series 60 Platform device.
Rich games are programmed in C++ for Symbian OS. They are multiple megabytes in size and are sold at retail on memory cards. Rich games are developed using an N-Gage SDK that extends Series 60 Platform. Access to the SDK and details about the specific extensions available in the SDK are provided only to authorized N-Gage developers. The SDK is required to produce MMC cards compatible with N-Gage.
So, why couldn't I run and develop my XBox games on my PC? Wasn't that the hype - port PC games to XBox in no time?
You're confusing a one-to-many relationship with a one-to-one relationship. In a "closed box" system like the Xbox there is only one possible graphcis device, one prossible sound device, one possible controller interface, etc. The code is targeted specifically for those exact devices and optimized heavily. Even the BIOS presents things to software differently from the standard AT BIOS. To run on a PC you would need to intercept requests, say to a specific IO address, then depending on which graphics hardware or sound hardware is being used, redirect and possibly reconfigure the request. This would need to be handled by virtualization of some hardware. The raw code for, say calculating artificial intelligence, however, could run natively.
With the NGage the hardware is supposedly not as highly specialized (aside from the input controller layout and large screen), making it work well on many systems.
I thought that the Xbox was based on DirectX and Windows NT. Doesn't DX and HAL (from NT) provide this layer of abstraction. How the driver and these layers optimize the code is of no concern to the developer. All I need to know is calling DrawLine(...) will draw me a line in a virtual space that DX translates into a screen image.
That's my understanding of Xbox internals.
As I understand it, that's only necessary to develop games which are supposed to use the copy protection feature. Otherwise, you can just grab the Series60 SDK and start programming. I'm not sure however if there is any additional benefit in the N-Gage SDK such as 2D/3D or input APIs. But reading that the N-Gage games seem to also run on other Series60 devices, I'm sceptical about that.