Impressive.

Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.

There is an open Half-Life 1 SDK on Valve's GitHub [1], not sure if it's missing something regarding the engine.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife

Yeah that's just the game logic which has been out since 1999. The rendering/networking/animation/UI/sound etc stuff is all still closed source (though apparently there is a leak from a Counter-Strike Online developer circulating among private hands - some code was contributed to Xash3D which perfectly implemented a non-trivial scripting system which was suspicious enough that it was removed).

What scripting system?

The .seq files that Ritual introduced in Condition Zero Deleted Scenes.

Isn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it.

I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.

Maybe.. kind of.

The Doom source code was originally released under a non-commercial license that was weirdly restrictive and it was eventually re-released under GPL. The Quake source code was released under GPL from the beginning.

If Valve really wanted to release HL1/GoldSrc source code, they could re-base to the GPL quake source code and release their changes as GPL as well. This would be a miserable job because the remaining quake code is probably scattered across the codebase in weird orphaned fragments, but afaik it would be completely legal.

e: oh yeah if the shambling zombie that is Sierra still holds any rights over HL1 then god knows what the IP situation is with that property

They bought the HL1 rights back from Sierra in the early 2000s. The real problem is that the code is not in a distributable state and nobody at Valve feels like working on putting it into a distributable state ( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/1712#issuec... ):

> A while back Valve [had] a partner perforce server that had depots of the source files for both gold source and source that were shared with development partners and some mod teams. This server had a major meltdown and those depots were lost. At the time there was no requests and no activity around gold source development. Resources to rebuild the depots did not exist and still don't so that code is just not available. Once a year someone talks about maybe pulling it together to open source it but once again there are not resources to do the actual work need to package it up. The Sven Co-op team was luck in that there was a package and someone to make it available to them, that does not exist today.

Didn't Valve release a huge update to Half-Life in 2023 (i.e. 6 years after the linked comment was written)?

Yeah they obviously still have the code. I think the important point there is server for partners - there is some things that licensees wouldn't get (uncompiled middlewares I'm guessing - they don't need to modify Bink/Miles/Havok etc).

Maybe... although I think some non-id idTech 3 games have been open sourced since then.

There was also the very early leak/theft of the Half-Life 2 beta source (https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_leak)

Everything's open source in the age of LLM-assisted Ghidra...

I think Xash3D and ReHLDS are already most of the way there already.

To me the Nokia N95 was close to a perfect phone, only the E61 or 62 then the E72 could beat it, especially for the price at the time.

I still like to think of a parallel time line where Symbian actually had a good and usable app store, and developers had been supported.

> developers had been supported

Before my time but I remember an old colleague saying how hard it was to find decent documentation for Symbian development.

Teenage me would've killed for an N900 back in the day.

Went with an iPhone 3GS.

Still think about that from time to time. I don't regret it, per-se, as the jailbreak scene at the time was very exciting.

N900 wasn't symbian, if that was what you implied.

It ran Maemo 5, and I still miss it even though I never owned one myself. Unfortunately Nokia fumbled everything.

And it was based on Debian. Installing an "app" was quite literally installing a deb package. Back in the day, I was working at a mobile software company and they had to call the IT guy (i.e. me) to explain how packaging works in Debian, just for the new Nokia they sent us, about a month before official launch. I tought the gadget was adorable.

Such phones also exist today. Have a look at Librem 5 and Pinephone.

Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.

I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747

Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...

Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!

I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95.

https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.

What is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.

fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.

OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.

I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.

EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!

That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?

There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons

802.11b/g :(

54Mbps is enough for anyone!

My powerful Android tablet is limited to 72mbps link due to a quirk with the way the XDA developer implemented wifi support on the lineageos branch of my tablet, meaning the device can't see the region specific 5ghz band of the modem of my ISP is outputting, so it can only connect to the 2,4ghz band of that SSID meaning it's stuck to 72mbps.

And despite this, it works ok for what I used it: Brave web browsing, youtube via newpipe, Plex and Jellyfin streaming.

Like I'm bummed I don't get the Gigabit and Wifi 6 speeds of the router and my internet plan is theoretically capable of, but somehow 72mbps seems sufficient in most of my use cases of that device so .. yay advanced video codecs I guess!?.

I get like 15-50 mbps down on my iPhone 16 when I'm on 5g... and that's enough to stream music, youtube, use as a hotspot, etc.

sometimes if I'm lucky i'll get much higher speeds but I guess being in a city with 100s of thousands of other people within a few miles of me means I have to do with like 40 mbps

The biggest negative about having slow clients using older, less efficient wifi generations is they end up making the network slower for everyone else who could be faster on that same channel.

Yeah I know, but I can't control it.

Live a little, allow horribly inefficient delightful retro device clients on a 2.4 GHz channel :)

WEP is where I’d personally draw the line, but the N95 fortunately supports WPA.

I set up an isolated network on my LAN with its own WAP to play with my old devices that don't support WPA. I don't leave it on all the time and the network segmentation limits any blast damage. Works well since I have so much old crap with early WiFi.

> OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.

Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.

SIP over Wi-Fi was so amazing on Symbian. Free international phone calls over Eduroam long before mobile Skype was a thing!

I've been playing with asterisk and SIP and I'd like a simple device that would allow a to b contact on their end if only in select locations.

So, thanks for this edit, because I now have the plan -- Dad gets to geek out and they get simple texting / calling but none of the other related phone bullshit. I'm pumped!

It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.

Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.

Have you checked the fair phone?

I don’t want the rat race of modern smartphones. I want an appliance.

I'm not the person that you replied to, but I have. I bought a FP3 and it's waiting in my drawer until the last 2G network goes down. I'm using my N86 until then.

I want/need a phone that I can answer with one hand without looking at the screen and can record phone calls automatically so don't have to search for pen and paper all the time. No current phone is capable of these two things.

Basically any Android phone where you can gain root access is capable, you can set up automatic recording of every call and set answering call with a button (like Volume Up).

> answering call with a button (like Volume Up)

Are you sure? I didn't find that option on FP3.

Don't know about FP3 specifically, but on some phones it's built-in in accessibility settings (all Samsung phones for example). For other phones you can try an app such as Button Mapper and assign "accept call" to a button.

I was big into dumbphones about 10-15 years ago and the problem with dumbphones is the same problem with dumbtv and other ones, is that the market is already small, and those in the market for these things are opinionated as shit about the specific configuration they want. So you are presented probably with maybe 2, 3 viable options if you are lucky, none are the thing that satisfies your actual needs, and they are all overpriced as shit because they have no competition because the market is so niche. So you probably end up buying the closest configuration possible to what you want and then spend your experience being slightly annoyed that it’s not fully there.

N95 was considered a smartphone at the time.

Devices with Symbian were smartphones.

Dumb objects are not totally niche. No one actually likes smarts that impede the core function. The Slate truck strips a lot of this out.

The trick with phones, since the smarts are a core function, is not making them dumb, but more akin to a PC. Less convenience served on a platter, more freedom to develop and install just what you want without compromising on UX. The N95 and other Symbian phones did this for me.

As Nokia Alumni, I would be happy with a Symbian Belle device like the C7 instead, but get the feeling, N95 was quite good as well.

> I would jump on a modern N95

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

N900 was a crazy phone, ahead of its time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU

At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it

I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.

I'd buy an N810 formfactor right now with modern guts.

Funny I tried to buy one of those breakout blackberry keyboards but they were sold out everywhere

This with DisplayPort Alt-Mode so it can be docked for desktop use is pretty much my dream device.

Not ARM but checkout the PinePhone, its also pretty much sold at cost (same as most Pine products)

The Pine Phone is cool, but the slide out keyboard on the N900/N810 was a big selling point for me.

Doesn’t it use an ARM CPU?

Yes; https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone#Specifications lists an Allwinner A64

Funny I was a supporter of their devices I bought both phones, laptop, tablets... Issue is the software man no drivers. Like the e-ink tablet had a great design/screen but the brush stroke was ass would leave dotted lines as you drew then it would render solid on lift up.

I'm complaining even though I'm not writing the drivers myself I get that.

Then you may want to pay a bit more and get a Librem 5.

The FxTec Pro 1 is the closest I've found these days; it has a slied-out keyboard and an unlocked bootloader so you can run LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch (PMOS support seems spotty).

The keyboard isn't as nice as those on phones from ~2010; it's a bit too big for the thumbs to really fly and sliding it in & out is not as effortless as it should be, but nless you count Unihertz's blackberry-likes, there's really nothing else around that comes close!

Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol

> They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s

As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.

YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.

I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.

I loved the n900 daily from mid-late 2010 to ~mid-2012. Text editor on "Debian". "Desktop" Firefox. Terminal. Maps. Some decent other apps: a good drawing app that I used on the train a lot for whiteboarding.

I liked Maemo 5. Having never used the n810 nor Maemo 4, I suppose didn't know what I was missing.

iPhone did not get copy-paste until mid-2009!

Eventually my n900's microSD jack broke off the board, which I've read was common.

This reminds me of 3.5 inch floppy drives. They were last manufactured in 2011. You can still buy "new" ones where they pull internal drives from old corporate machines and then wrap them in a new plastic enclosure with USB converter board to make them an external drive.

Now instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?

Probably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?

Well, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs

Might as well skip to Crysis at this rate.

332 MHz Dual ARM 11 ?! Half-Life ran smooth in Pentium 100 single core.

Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.

Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.

I played it back when it came out on a P166 in software mode and it was fine at that resolution.

I did the same, I do wonder if it holds up as well as my memory remembers. Probably not.

Like I remember Doom running fine on my 486 SX 25Mhz, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that great. It took a top end Pentium to really get it into smooth-ish 20fps+ territory.

The crunchiness of the software rendering from that era is embedded in my memory like visual dial up handshake noise.

Of course no.

DOOM wasn't fine on Am486DX4 100MHz and Ziggurat Vertigo was like 5fps at best on it.

Ziggurat Vertigo was Quake, not Doom.

>> DOOM wasn't fine on Am486DX4 100MHz and [Quake's] Ziggurat Vertigo was like 5fps at best on it.

Are you happy now?

It doesn't have a dual CPU or dual-core CPU. It's one CPU core plus a DSP core (which is probably not used by the game).

Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.

Pentium 1 133mhz ran Quake2 pretty darn well as long as you had hardware accel. Without hadware accel it was ass.

(maybe even Pentium 100)

nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)

Yeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.

Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.

"My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"

I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.

If you condition yourself to be OK with 15-25 fps, it's almost fine. If you run a game at 60FPS generally, then an occasional hiccup of 100ms will really throw you off. Similarly, the gameplay must be designed differently between low and high FPS games - you don't want the player to feel like they'd have been able to play the game differently if it was running smoother.

Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.

Nope . Software renderer.

Quake 2 and Half life had pure software renderer for people who didn't have 3D acceleration cards such as Voodoo.

It was slow but worked on ANY graphical card :)

I would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..

Litteraly a phone out of his time

Wild how back in the days, phone chips were 10 years behind PCs in performance, but now they are almost the same (in single-core performance, anyway).

Oooh! I fondly remember my N95! Pictures and movies it took were great, at least for the time, and it had apps and a lot of stuffs like a browser that were presented as new on the phone space when the first iPhone was released, while I had my N95 for almost a year at this time. Symbian was a really nice system.

Symbian was really awful OS. Nokia's mistake was ignoring Maemo.

I liked Symbian a lot, but I agree that Maemo was superior! Two after what I told above, in 2010, a few friends of mine had N900 and they seemed great. I was still in my study at the time and I interviewed for a summer internship at Nokia to work on Maemo and it was going great, but at some point during the recruitment process, that part of Nokia was sold (to Intel I think? the MeeGo project was announced a bit later) so they stopped all hiring even of interns and I had to find another internship.

And you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.

I had this phone when it was released. I really loved it. But one thing I remember the most was using it as fidgeting toy. Just opening and closing it. So satisfying.

This makes me sad. Not that this work was done, it’s incredible, but that we’ve fallen so far from what was possible on meager hardware. Now everyone has a super computer in Their pocket that feel slow.

Eh. I’m on a 5 year old iPhone and it still feels perfectly fast.

My 6-year-old Samsung usually feels pretty quick, too, with its 8 CPU cores and 12GB of RAM.

We used to do most of the same things (browse the web, send some email or texts, make phone calls, listen to music, watch videos) with hardware that was positively tiny by comparison.

Your 5 year old iPhone has how many cores, how many GBs of RAM?

I would need to search the specs, but a N95 has 1 core and well below 1GB. A factor of dozens in the specs, but still you can get good user experience on the old devices if the software is written in a smart way.

The lower resolution of the N95 acts in favor of performance. But admittedly against user experience.

64MB RAM on the Nokia N95.

And their 5 year old iPhone can run a game that looks a hell of a lot better than Half-Life on 320x240@30 FPS too. Just listing that the hardware is different than the other doesn't give a comparison. Was there really not a shittily made app for the N95 at all? Are there really not apps that perform well on a 5 year old iPhone?

We're just looking at a single app optimized for a platform nearly 2 decades after release and somehow concluding people don't ever optimize software these days. Some software is always going to be inefficient as can be but there is more well optimized software available now than there ever has been.

N95 was not "meager" for it's time - it was faster than the first iPhone.

what if any games have you played lately that you considered similar to Half-Life (all cutscenes in game while you are 100% interactive and free to do whatever, including ignoring the NPC)

Holy sh*t Tom’s Hardware has gone downhill. Every advert snuck past both my Pi-Hole and my iOS filters, and it even tried forcing a file download on site open on my iPhone.

As for the HL1 port: I love it, always wanted an N95 (I had an N80ie that I loved), and these sorts of retro experiments are always a joy to read about.

You might need to update your filters. Using AdGuard Pro on iOS I’m not seeing any ads.

Guess I get to figure out why gravity didn’t update or how Tom’s snuck past my filters this weekend.

Fweh.

I simply use brave browser at the moment. I did not see any ads.

Until MV3 catches up to Brave (eventually)

This has been answered many times already. The short version: Brave's adblocker is not an extension, so manifest v3 has no effect on it.

I remember getting a self signing cert from some shady Chinese homepage in the 200Xs and loading and connecting to Quakeworld onto my Nokia Symbian phone around that time. edit: https://allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Get_Quake_R... (2008)

No RomPatcher+ and InstallServer patch?

BTW, if anyone is interested, there's a TLS patch for Nokia S60v3 and UIQ based on mbedtls. Makes mail work again.

https://github.com/JigokuMaster/Symbian-TLS-Patch

How did he do it without the Half-life source-code?

"Ports of Half-Life to unusual platforms generally lean on Xash3D, an open-source engine compatible with Valve's GoldSrc"

I loved my n95.

Popup with "Do you want to download <several lines of random characters> from tomshardware.com ?"

No thank you, and I won't be coming back.

I guess it's time to bite the bullet and install Brave.