Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

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.

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.

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.

Litteraly a phone out of his time

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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!

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

Litteraly a phone out of his time

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

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

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

What scripting system?

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What scripting system?

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.

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

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.

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

Half-Life on a Nokia N95

(Image credit: X.com @dante_leoncini)

Argentine developer Dante Leoncini has gotten the original Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95, the Symbian slider phone that launched in 2007, and has added mouse and keyboard support, he said in a post on X this week. Leoncini says that while some slowdowns remain, he has pinned down the cause and is working on a fix, the latest step in a series of efforts to run heavyweight software on the dual-core, 332 MHz handset. Half-Life shipped in 1998, needing a 133 MHz Pentium and 24MB of RAM at minimum, specs the N95 clears on paper. To date, Leoncini has managed to run Quake 3, Crash Bandicoot, and emulate Sega, ScummVM, and NES on the handset.

Half-Life 1 on the Nokia N95 finally reached 30 FPS! Some slowdowns remain, but I've already identified the cause and am working on a fix. Mouse and keyboard support has also been added. Still a few bugs to fix, but it's getting there.#HalfLife #nokia #symbian #valve #steam pic.twitter.com/PDlq2CRxAyJune 5, 2026

The N95 pairs a 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420, a dual-core part built around the ARM11 design, with a PowerVR MBX 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, and a 240x320 display, all under Symbian OS 9.2 and S60 3rd Edition. An 8GB storage variant, released later in 2007, doubled the memory to 128MB.

Because the phone runs an Arm processor and a non-Windows operating system, getting Half-Life onto it requires a native Symbian build rather than emulation of the PC version. Leoncini has said before that the limiting factor on his earlier Quake 3 work was the CPU, which aligns with the slowdowns he’s now chasing.

Ports of Half-Life to unusual platforms generally lean on Xash3D, an open-source engine compatible with Valve's GoldSrc that’s been built for Android, the Raspberry Pi, and the Meta Quest. Whether Leoncini's N95 version uses it isn’t confirmed, however.

The OMAP 2420 architecture has managed to carry a game running at 30 FPS before. Way, way back in 2008, GMSArena reported that developer Olli Hinkka had ported Quake III Arena to S60 3rd Edition phones running the same chipset, with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support and the option to host a multiplayer server on the phone itself. That port ran on the N95 8GB, N82, and E90, but not the original N95, which carried half the RAM of the 8GB model; Leoncini hasn’t said which N95 variant he’s using.

Half-Life is one of several things Leoncini has built or ported for the N95, alongside a from-scratch Blender clone called Blendersito and his own game engine, both on his GitHub. Running. In terms of the N95 as his choice of hardware medium, it’s far from the weirdest one we’ve seen.

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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.

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Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

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