Database Users

Wizard and gaming, my thoughts/hints

To start off, I don't have a Wizard, I own a Universal. I am thinking about moving to the Wizard for gaming. I like the button setup on the wizard. Now, I know most of you are thinking, don't consider the buttons because the phone keys can't be mapped. However, I would like to recommend a program to you all called aebuttonplus, which will allow you to map the phone buttons to "virtual buttons." These virtual buttons can be recognized by programs like Pocetnestor and gnuboy. At least they work on my Universal.
My other concern is that the processor isn't fast enough. Seems like you all are overclocking, but apparently you can't run spbplus, which I really need. This may be a problem for me, and there is no discussion here, I have to run spbplus.
So, my next thought is the Apache. A faster processor, from what I understand, that doesn't need overclocking. I just don't like the antenna nub. Also, the buttons aren't quite an issue on this device, but I don't know about the joystick.
I would also recommend to you all the bluetooth gamepad, I have found drivers that work on the Universal. It really takes gaming to a new level on a PDA.
Thanks for any advice/thoughts/responses.

hey give me more info on this bluetooth gamepad.

My wizard is not overclocked and runs SPB Pocket Plus without any problem, the device is as responsive as it it without SPB Plus.

i have yet to really get into gaming on the wizard... the butotn layout just does work for me good..
im thinking the bast games for wizard are point and click type games like myst or simple games like who wants to be a millionare
need for speed is ok but madden is unplayable for me.. control is horrible

Wow, 200 views and 3 replies. You Wizard folk are gamin' fools, LOL.
Anyhow, the bluetooth gamepad is called the Freedom Bluetooth gamepad. There's lots of different brandnames for it. Google away.
Koksie, I was referring to overclocking in order to run game emulators. Problem is, overclocking is supposedly disabled by sbp. Don't know why, but that's what I've read in these forums.
Guyver, thanks for your reply on the buttons, I guess you are saying the buttons work okay for gaming?
I can't believe you guys don't play game emulators (like NES, gameboy, etc.). A nice time waster when you are sitting in a department store, wedding, etc.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post.
I use Omapclock to sometimes overclock my Wizard when running TomTom and it works fine, in TCPMP my clock speed is shown as 226 Mhz when I put it in 240 in Omapclock. When I put it back to 180 Mhz in Omapclock ( the default speed), TCPMP shows a 170 Mhz speed, so Omapclock works imo.
I used to play around with Morphgear and Ninentendo emulators on my Magician, but the button lay-out on that device made it hard to play games. Sound and display of the games were ok though. On my Wizard I have not tried it, although with this button lay-out is should be easier to control the games. Speed and sound of the games might be an issue though, even when overclocked.

Thanks, Koksie, good info!

I can overclock my Wizard to 264mhz with SPB pocketplus. That's plenty to run a snes emulator etc. It is an arse not being able to assign hardware buttons though :/

I've grabbed the emulators off the ftp, but where do I get roms for games?

mike freegan said:
I can overclock my Wizard to 264mhz with SPB pocketplus. That's plenty to run a snes emulator etc. It is an arse not being able to assign hardware buttons though :/
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Mike, you're exactly the person I want to talk to. Try a program called aebuttonplus, and you can assign the phone buttons to "virtual buttons" which are recognized by the emulator. It works on my universal, at least, and the button setup on the Wizard is much better than the Universal. Give it a shot and let me know if that helps.

I actually meant to say that the layout isnt too good fpr gaming...atleast 4 me

well with pocket nester. if you turn off GAPI landscape mode works fine and you can assign keyboard buttons to whatever you want.
as of right now, to make it usable also turn on alternate scanning of keys for multiple button presses.
knowing both of these makes games "playable" but not nearly as nice as a real joystick.
our best bet is to bug any developer or possibly collectively pay together to have some fix all the open source emus out there.
landscape Is by far the best way to game on this bad boy. but from eperience the keypad is lackluster AT best for controlling games.
right now the only emu out that supports keypad/landscape mode is pocket nester.
turn off gapi in video settings. and turn on alternate key scanning for best possie controls on device.
sorry for misspellings/grammar errors, I am posting this from my wizard.

Playstation 1 emulator! (FPSEce 9.6)

I recently put the Sony Playstation emulator FPSEce 9.6 on my Cingular 8525 and it is way too cool! Curently I have Army Men 3D (full speed), Crash Bandicoot (kinda slow but playable), Tekken 1 (kinda slow but playable), Mega Man (near full speed), Gran Turismo 1 (kinda slow but playable), Driver 1 (kinda slow but playable), San Rush Extreme Racing (near full speed), Twisted Metal 4 (near full speed), and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (kinda slow but playable) all playing on my phone! Guy's try it out, you won't find better pocket pc games than those of Playstation 1. Just own the games and a Playstation to make having the bios legal (Google on how to extract bios).
What I want out of this post is for everyone that uses FPSEce on this phone to list the games that they have found to be compatible with the tytn model phone running this emulator. I will update it as well when I find any new compatible games. Enjoy!

I use Metal Slug X Super Vehicle 001 full speed
mortal kombat 2 & Cool Boarders 3 runs a bit slower..

Is there a Site where i can find the Images?
Or do I have to rip everything by myselve?

As above, but legally speaking I would guess you need to own the originals!!!
What size files do these games produce when ripped and what software do you use?
Crash Bandicoot is my all time favorite game on the PS... you mentioned its slow, but playable... is it so slow that I might end up throwing my MDA across the room

To answer the first question, yes you do need to own the originals. I have a used game store that I visit that still sells used playstation 1 games. Most of them they let me have for $3 to $5 each. Pretty cheap pocket pc games if you ask me!
I use a program called "Magic Iso" to rip the games. Then I use a program called "Pocket Iso" to rip out the movies and shrink them. To get Magic Iso just go to (www.magiciso.com), I only use the trial version of this software. To get Pocket Iso go to (www.fpsece.net). I have been able to shrink a game down to between 39mb to 304mb. Some games will let you rip out all the movies and music where some will not. Kind of a trial and error thing.
Crash is like I said "playable" @ maybe 12 - 14 fps. There is a frame skip option on FPSEce that you can use that helps some. To some that frame rate might convince someone to throw their MDA across the room but there are other games that play at near full speed that you can always use. Still cool to see Crash on a PDA though! Hope all this helps!

Does it eat up a lot of battery life quickly when you play the games?

Not that I've noticed. The juice holds up very well! As a matter of fact I can't tell tell any difference between running this emulator and running a normal ppc application when it comes to battery life. Hope that helps!

Crazy thing, I experimented with a Gameboy Advance emulator yesterday for this phone and the Playstation 1 emulator not only has much better graphics but on average runs I'd say 10% faster! I was surprised that PocketGBA was so taxing! One advantage that PocketGBA had over FPSEce was that the roms are so much smaller. Anyhow, just thought I'd give you guy's a little more info on my findings.

I just found this (kind of slow, lol) but I was wondering how those running it were doing with performance?
I put it on my 8525 and downloaded the Spyro Demo (that was in the thread to download fpseCE) and it ran like... 13 fps. which is kind of unplayable.
Also, if I get a call/text/notification of any sort, or run it in anything other than portrait mode, I can't quit it and have to soft reset.
Any performance tips? Or any idea what my problem is with the buttons/options/inability to quit thing? lol
Thanks.

Hope this helps.
What version of fpsece are you using? I'm running the latest release of the emulator (fpsece 9.6). So, for starters get the latest release if you don't have it because I noticed ALOT more bugs in the older releases. Depending on how you map your buttons it should take care of if pulling up the other applications you mentioned. Me, I have my controls mapped to my keyboard and I run the emulator in landscape mode. Also, to assist in the speed issue, I run the emulator on a frameskip of 3 and that seems to work well for most games. Of course it's not going to play as good as it did on the PS1 but I think you will find alot of games to be more than playable. Just keep in mind that you are playing far superior games on your pocket pc with the PS1 games and it will need just a little patience to enjoy. Hope that helps!

Has anyone managed to get FFVII running nicely on this on a Hermes?
I get jerky sound and no FMV support, anyone managed to get it ok?
thanks, Forlornity

any answer?

Well I've solved that problem now: bad rip, but I still have a problem in landscape mode: I can't exit without using soft resetting! Has anyone got a workaround for this?

Nevermind, I've fixed that too, for those of you wondering: Just ensure that you assign a "menu" button before going into landscape mode and when you press that menu button, ensure your Hermes is closed (i.e. No keyboard visible)

NICE! how does Parasite EVE 2 run on this?
can it detect CD change?

I'm able to run Final Fantasy VII at nearly full speed on my WM6 Wizard. Of course I need to overclock a little so its smoother without any frame skip. I hate the frame skip on such a good game like FF7.
There are a couple glitches with the new 9.6 version but much better than the previous one I tried. Sometimes the Messenger and IE buttons instead of doing their PS equivalent it opens up messenger/IE. Also sometimes the title bar appears and it covers up the right side of the screen in landscape.
Has anyone able to tweak a little extra performance out of the emulator by glyph / font / file system tweaks? Or by increasing those buffers does it slow down the game because of the lesser amount of available RAM?
"Oh you got the iPhone ...whoopdie freakin do ...can it play PLAYSTATION games like mine can??? I don't think so... puahhhahahahhaa"

Can som1 confirm if the games are playable on a HTC touch?

Anyone try to run Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? If so, does it stand up to playing it on the PS1 at all? If it does, I'd like to know, as this game would definately be my reason to download the emulator!

problem with emulator
the emulator goes back to the starting menu screen when I try to load an iso. I have set the bios and mapped the buttons to the keyboard. I also turned the screen to landscape and turned framskip on. Does anyone else have this problem? Is this a bad rip or another problem? The iso I used works perfectly on my playstation.
The emulator would actually go to the about screen after I try to load an iso.
Can someone post exactly how they installed this onto their Hermes? I want to find out what I'm doing wrong!

Ive run this on the hermes and magician and both had the same problem with the button layouts. The games will run ok once you set them up but the controls are in wierd places so gameplay is hard if not impossible especially on some of the faster moving games.
And as for buttons on the screen, that would work great if it was multi point touch.

Working Games and game related questions...please post here

I dont normally play games on me mobile but things have changed since I got my SPV3100 and now my Ameo!
Was thinking we could start a list with useful links of games that actually work on the ameo.
Ive managed to find a classic, wolfenstein 3d, its a complete port and it runs really well!
I was wondering tho if anyone can get Quake or Doom working. (found hpc doom but it crashes at the very start, looks like it would work but doesnt)
What games do you guys have working on your Athena?

Got Doom Working! Its Great!
Managed to get doom working fine.
Heres where you need to go to download the program, it runs in Portrait at the moment but works smoothly nonetheless.
http://home.freeuk.com/gamefreaks/pql/gfDoom.htm
Keys:
Joystick - Directional Control
Tap at the bottom half of the screen / Comm Manager Button - Fire
If you want to exit, click the X in the top right, then Press the camera button. Once in the main menu, move down to exit game and then press the camera button again.
You need to have the DOOM1.wad file (read the readme file that comes with the program from explainations)
Very nice!
Have fun!

My personal favourites are
SPB Brain Evolution (although it infuriates me!)
SPB Air Islands (the game sucks, but it has some cool minigames and it's VGA!)

ScummVM is a must! Its free, you just have to get the game files. There are even some free games.
Favourites of mine, Sam 7 Max, Simon the Sourcerer, Day of the Tentacle
It works, but you have problems starting it up. Start with the pda in portrait mode, and fumble your way around to the options menu to get to graphics settings and turn on the 2x doubling. Once thats done it works fine from then on.

Megadrive Emulator
Managed to get PicoDrive working altho all the keys are messed up because of the screen orientation, it seems to get the joystick confused, and makes UP left and DOWN right for some reason, still looks good on the Ameo tho!
Keep em coming!
Thanks for the games so far

Pyrofer said:
ScummVM is a must! Its free, you just have to get the game files. There are even some free games.
Favourites of mine, Sam 7 Max, Simon the Sourcerer, Day of the Tentacle
It works, but you have problems starting it up. Start with the pda in portrait mode, and fumble your way around to the options menu to get to graphics settings and turn on the 2x doubling. Once thats done it works fine from then on.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow! ScummVM rocks! I had forgotten how much I loved Sam n Max!

findus said:
My personal favourites are
SPB Brain Evolution (although it infuriates me!)
SPB Air Islands (the game sucks, but it has some cool minigames and it's VGA!)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gotta agree with you on Spb Brain Evo ..simply the nuts. I also like the 'Real Dice' ensemble of games like;
Real Dice Mahjong
Real Dice Dominos
Real Dice Sudoku Master II......all are in high quality genuine VGA. They look and play really well.

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (2.0 beta) works perfectly (just remember to set the phone to portrait view before starting). Now with the "original" music sounds!
http://www.esoftinteractive.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1570

SIM Coupe (SAM Coupe emulator) works okay if you start in Portrait mode with only the "keyboard" menu being present as a glitch. (I thought I'd posted about Pocket Commodore Plus/4, too, which works but is PAINFULLY slow sometimes).

For bought games, Broken Sword (Astraware) demo looks very very promising indeed; it rotated the screen correctly and looks very pretty, and appears to be playing at the correct speed.

Hi
This is my first post so hope im doing this ok.
I am thinking of getting one of there phones as a friend has one.
I currently have a hermes and all is ok, the problem is that the athena is lacking in buttons on the front that are needed to play games, like "fire" in worms for example.
none of the keyboard buttons seem to work.
Is there a way round this?
thanks
Sean.

I have the same trouble, Worms in X7500 only admit two buttons and the game requires three buttons to work correctly.
Can someboy modify the wwpsave.dat as somebody did for the HTC Touch to make the x7500 buttons workable for this game???
Thank you.

SNES Emulation Speed

I've been thinking of getting an HTC P4350 (Herald) lately, but the one thing holding me back is the 200MHz TI OMAP 850 processor. What I am interested in finding out before making the purchase is how well the 200MHz processor handles SNES emulation. Because I play SNES games like Chrono Trigger alot, I would like to make sure that the Herald can handle these games at a decent speed before I make the purchase. If anyone can let me know their experience with SNES emulation on the Herald, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

Hi Jester_b84
I've been using the SNES Emulator on the Herald. The games we're running good with 200 MHz processor speed of the Herald. What I have never got working is the sound of SNES games.
And I've never played your game "Chrono Trigger" but a lot of other like "Super Mario" and "F-Zero".
Another possibility is to overclock the processor for playing SNES games. Just look around the forum. I'm sure you'll find some more information about overclocking the Herald...
Raftbone

Hello raftbone, thanks for your response. It's good news that you have SNES running smoothly on the Herald. I used to use n0p's port of SNES9x and it was running great, but slightly slow on my 624MHz processor and there were incompatibilities with some games I like to play. I switched to MorphGear tonight and it ran very smoothly (with sound) on a 624MHz processor. If only I could try it on a 200MHz processor, that would be great...

Hi Jester
I'll try it for you. Just downloaded MorphGear. I only need to find some free time today to test it on the herald. I'll let you know my experience as soon as I can...

raftbone said:
Hi Jester
I'll try it for you. Just downloaded MorphGear. I only need to find some free time today to test it on the herald. I'll let you know my experience as soon as I can...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks raftbone! I will wait eagerly for your results.

Sorry for the long delay... I've tested MorphGear with my Herald. Games like Super Mario run very smooth, but what I cannot get working is the sound. Same problem as with Pocket SNES.
The other problem with MorphGear is, that the display does not automatically switch to landscape mode when sliding out the keyboard...
If you'd like to play SNES games, this is in general no problem with the Herald (but without sound) but I prefer Pocket SNES than MorphGear...
Hope this may help you

Thank you for your testing raftbone, I greatly appreciate it! At first, I could not get sound working under MorphGear either - but here is my solution:
- Go to Global Settings
- Make sure "Enable Sound" is checked & Volume @ 100%
- Go to SNES9x (SNES) settings
- Under "Sound", make sure both "Enable Sound" and "Emulate" are checked
- Close and re-launch MorphGear.
Now, sound should work perfectly!

Thanks for the hint. Sounds works now

So which runs faster, n0p's or MorphGear?

they're more ore less running on the same speed...
my personal favourite is still n0p's pocket snes.

don't know about yall but i was trying to run chrono trigger with n0ps and it was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow

unknown00 said:
don't know about yall but i was trying to run chrono trigger with n0ps and it was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow
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Click to collapse
Did you try MorphGear? On my current PPC, MorphGear runs much faster than n0p's PocketSNES port when playing Chrono Trigger.

Hello, I was chacking out the Herald today at T-Mobile. Generally, how well does it feel to pay SNES or NES on the phone? I assume you use the directional buttons as the d-pad. What about A, B, X, Y, and L & R?
Games like Mario World are very demanding of precise control. Is the Herald a good platform for playing such games?
Thanks!

I haven't been playing SNES stuff yet, just NES games right now, but for the controls, I've found that using the slide out keyboard is a lot more comfortable for me than the built-in buttons. I map the A/B?etc buttons to the keyboard buttons (don't map to the arrow buttons though) and when playing games, I'll slide out the keyboard, change the orientation back to portrait, and launch my emulator. Games that require multiple button presses (e.g., pressing A while holding down B) are still a little difficult for me to play, but otherwise works pretty well.
As for Morphgear, I'll have to give it a try for the SNES emu...I used it for NES emu and it was slower than Pcoketnester.

Can anyone please attach the CAB files for Morphgear and the SNES module? The official Morphgear site is undergoing some work, and you can't download from there right now.

24vggpd2 said:
Can anyone please attach the CAB files for Morphgear and the SNES module? The official Morphgear site is undergoing some work, and you can't download from there right now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nevermind, I finally found it, but it refuses to load an SNES rom on my T-Mobile wing. It complains about a lack of memory.

24vggpd2 said:
Nevermind, I finally found it, but it refuses to load an SNES rom on my T-Mobile wing. It complains about a lack of memory.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hey guys whats up
i downloaded morphgear but the installer only sets up the software on my pc and not to my tmobile wing (active sync is running)
any way around this?

24vggpd2 said:
Nevermind, I finally found it, but it refuses to load an SNES rom on my T-Mobile wing. It complains about a lack of memory.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Silly question but did you try a soft reset before? Did you try removing anything that takes up memory (like Today plugins) and trying again?
@vudu: What emulator are you using BTW?

jester_b84 said:
Silly question but did you try a soft reset before? Did you try removing anything that takes up memory (like Today plugins) and trying again?
@vudu: What emulator are you using BTW?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried the reset. I didn't try disabling anything on the Today Screen, though I had already disabled everything except MyFavs and BatteryStatus.
It's all moot now. I returned my Wing and cancelled my T-Mobile account. Mobile IE is a spectacular POS. A web browser was the primary reason I bought a PDA phone, so when the browser sucked, the phone sucked.

I ran morphgear on my PPC 6700, it ran most games fine, would slow down sometimes if a lot was going on at once. I don't think I ever had a problem with the sound, just had to tinker with the settings. I liked morphgear much better than pocetsnes. Chrono Trigger played well, with a slight delay. The PPC 6700 has a 400mhz processor, I don't know about the Herald because it has 200mhz, but I am getting a Wing this week so I would like to know if it's worth even installing.

Just another performance thread, or...??

Hi all,
First, I did not want to start a thread like this, but Iam reading XDA Devs since the beginning of September '08 and I did not find anything that can really help me out with my X1 performance.
I understand this is not really primary gaming device, but...when I try game EMUlators like FPSce, pocketGBA, all games there are running damn slowly (15fps and lower), switching hardware acceleration in pocketGBA and most games just does not work. When I try classic CAB games, they are usually slow, some scrolling type games (Worms, Atomic Cannon, some RPG's, etc. does not have smooth scrolling and it looks terrible). Some problems can be a bit solved with WVGA switcher (when you switch to VGA mode, it helps performance a bit). JAVA games are just same case, slow and slow (15+- fps).
I read everywhere in reviews, that X1 got really strong hardware...but the truth? OS is slow too (what could I expect from WM, heh?), applications are slow, even the damn scrolling in the application browser (programs, settings) are damn slow and there is scroll tearing.
Does anyone of you got information about incoming updates (drivers,...) or are there any tweaks or drivers or anything that REALLY helps the X1 performance? Please, dont mention advanced tool, xperia tweak, etc. Those tweaks does not really improve the performance at all.
Last thing: dont get me wrong, I really like my X1, but these things really annoys me and I bet it annoy most of you too. Thanks for all suggestions.

Emulators...
I play many games with really nice fps on my x1...
Mostly using Morphgear
without sound ->SNes/Genesis/GamboyAdvance games ->40 fps or more
with sound -> Gamboy games -> full fps + sound
Otherwise try different PocketSnes versions and Pocket GBA (without sound)
Check also:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=442303
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=409990
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=437927
If sounds is REALLY important for you (when playing games) then buy the Asus P565 (Touch Diamond style device without keyboard but with speeeed) !
With the P565 you can run any emulator on 100 % with sound and even FpseCE with good fps + sound.
P565 and comparison:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=466435
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=446317
Greets !