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.

Comments

Strange

[autopr0n]

So nokia didn't do anything special with their hardware, it's just a standard J2ME system? That seems pretty stupid...

Now that I think about it, that's basicaly what MS did with the Xbox. I wonder how easy/difficult it would be to play those games on a standard PC?

Re:Strange

[gl4ss]

not standard j2me system(heck, the resolutions differ from in different j2me devices enough to not make them unworkable in most phones, in most phones apart from s60 phones the j2me is very freakking limited when it comes to .jar size and heap size anyways).

it's a standard s60 system(as pointed out), and s60 has been available for a while and most software available for it can be found cracked on the net(yahoo groups, irc, the usual places where you would find warez). this shouldn't really surprise anyone.

as for playing on pc, i'm not so sure about that(but it shouldn't be overhelmingly difficult to find enough docs that would make it possible to do such an emulator that would run binaries compiled for them).

also theres slight differences in thos s60 phones, for example while the pad in ngage doesn't block itself(so that you can press both up and left at the same time) the pad in 3650 blocks itself(so that you can't press up and left at the same time). i'd just except them to come with up some better execution environment checks with the next range of games(after which the crackers find a way around them too).

anyways, this should give some indication how much nokia had to shell out for actually developing the ngage hardware(not much, as they had done it for other phones already). kind of how their first mp3 playing phone was basicly a quick hack too(though, now it seems they're unifying the hardware to be pretty same in most of their phones, the cheaper smaller phones have already mostly exactly same innards).

next week on slashdot: crackers crack securerom cd protection on pc! gp32 has copied games!

DMCA

[pvt_medic]

so how long till a lawsuit is filed for violations of Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

While I respect the effort, ...

[burgburgburg]

the important question is: Are the games formerly soley available on the N-Gage that good that they're worth playing on other phones/devices/etc.?

Big impact

[Mechanik]

So let's see, this will let you add a total of, what, like 4 whole games to your library for your non-N-Gage phone?

Don't get me wrong, it's still neat in a way, but "Crappy game system with no games gets cracked so you can play those nonexistant games elsewhere" seems somewhat underwhelming.


Mechanik

Lousy Games

[bstadil]

Look at Game Ranking to get a sense of the poor quality of the N-Gage games.

Game Ranking has ever removed the N-Gage from the frontpage listing of platforms, that they had a few week ago.

Re:Whatever....

[botzi]

Jeez??? Interesting?? /. can always surprise me. Let's put it that way *dude*. Have you seen THPS on the N-Gage? No? Well, let me than tell you that it is FAR AHEAD of the current state of mobile gaming and nothing before the PSP will even get closer. As for this crack the small catch* is that the games programmed for Symbian 6 will be surely played on every phone runnning the OS, what they forget to tell you is that having the hardware to run the Os, doesn't mean you have the hardware to run the game(SonicN is a 3mb 2d-game, there're even better java games there(imagine how ugly is it). So mod the whole article as flamebait at least till the next generation of 600$ phones and then spending 600$ for a smartphone and using it is a game platform is not magnificient move, IMHO.

Oh, and to all the j2me trolls out there. The games for the N-Gage are done in C++ with the approriate SDK.

PS: As for the major flaws: Another crack that come out this week is that all the N-Gage games can now be run from a memory card(not ROM). Conclusion => the original "flow" of having to change the card each time you want to play another game is somehow fixed by the *crackers*. The biggest game I've seen for the moment is ~15 MB. 5-6 games fit pretty well on a 64Mb card don't you think????
Finally the N-Gage is a very good gaming system suffering from a restricted(if any?) game catalog and ridiculous price. I get mine for 90$ from a morron reading too many negetavie reviews, so kudos to you gyus.

IMHO, alot.

[Ch_Omega]

As if the N-Gage wasnt having enough problems, now what reason do people have to actually pay money for this thing?

Well, not to sound like an Nokia marketteer, but in my opinion, the N-Gage has recieved alot unfair critisism, maybe because of it trying so hard to be both fish and fowl.

First of all, the N-Gage is a standard Series60 phone, exept for a few small differences, as f.eks. stereo sound(enabling Stereo MP3's/ogg's), FM-radio(which no other series60 phone has) and lack of camera(which all other series60 phones has). So, if you simply want a cheap series60 phone(to f.eks. use as a small PDA/web browser on the go(Opera)/radio/MP3/Ogg-player), and don't need a camera, the N-Gage might be a better alternative than f.eks. any of the other series60 phones. If not used primarly as a gamedevice, alot of it's criticism will be more or less irrelevant. And as of the speaker/microphone placement, using a handfree will solve that...

Another thing that is worth pointing out, is that even though you can now download and run games on other Series60 devices(and that is, *ONLY on series60 devices*), most of them don't support more than one simultanous key-press, and the keys aren't exactly layed with gaming in mind. Anyone who has ever played emulated gameboy games on f.eks. a Nokia 3650 will probably nod their heads when I say that it sucks.

So, even though it seems to be vogue to hate it, It's still a great device(in a PDA-sense) in my opinion, even though it's not too successfull at what Nokia had in mind, namely gaming.