MAME in the Nokia 6600

One of the interesting aspects of the Nokia 6600 is that it's highly hackable. It runs the Symbian operative system, so you can download lots of applications and games. Today I was hacking a little to see if you could actually play Galaxian and... it seems you can.

You have to download MAME for Series 60 (stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and then some ROMs from a place like ROM-World [look for the Galaxian ROM, 9 KB]. The emulator can be installed with the Nokia PC Suite for 6600 software on your PC, using a serial cable or via Bluetooth. With that software you can also transfer the ROMs containing the games (directly on .zip files) to the folder labeled C:\Mame\Roms or E:Mame\Roms (depending if you have installed it on the telephone memory C: or the memory card E:)... and then you are ready.

Of course, it's more fun doing all this than actually playing the games -- in fact MAME is a little bit slow and it only emulates the oldest games (and downloading the ROMs seems to be illegal anyway).

Galaxian is a Namco game dating back to 1979, so it's 25 years old right now. On that era year it seemed to run on a Z80 3 MHz processor and a 256 x 224 screen. The software itself was 8.192 bytes in lenght. Today, as you can see, it runs on a 125 grams Nokia 6600 mobile phone on a 176 x 208 screen, equipped with 32+6 MB memory (5.000 times more) and you can take it on your pocket.

Never say GAME OVER.

Update: I also installed the really mythical C-64 emulator for 6600, a variant of Frodo named E32Frodo. Basically you have to install the .sis file,then download some games from C64.com, storing everything in the \documents\E32Frodo\ folder. Really impressive. Here you can see the emulator running M.U.L.E. or Realm of Impossibility in the phone.

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