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57% Positive

Analyzed from 935 words in the discussion.

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#still#open#half#life#old#source#https#com#phone#valve

Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kotaKat•3 days ago
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.

realityfactchex•2 minutes ago
> 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.

ndiddy•about 2 hours ago
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.
kotaKat•about 2 hours ago
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!

Melatonic•27 minutes ago
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

rahimnathwani•23 minutes ago
802.11b/g :(
ge96•about 2 hours ago
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

geoffeg•2 minutes ago
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.
Maxion•about 2 hours ago
Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol
jamesfinlayson•3 days ago
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.

skotobaza•3 days ago
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

jamesfinlayson•3 days ago
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).
WorldMaker•39 minutes ago
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.

redox99•about 2 hours ago
What scripting system?
inigyou•about 3 hours ago
Everything's open source in the age of LLM-assisted Ghidra...
ljf•3 days ago
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.

app134•3 days ago
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.

tjoff•about 3 hours ago
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.

ezst•about 2 hours ago
Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.
jamesfinlayson•3 days ago
> 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.

itrunsdoomguy•about 2 hours ago
I would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..
steadyw0•about 1 hour ago
Litteraly a phone out of his time
DenisDolya•2 days ago
Now instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?
inigyou•about 3 hours ago
Probably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?
deniska•about 2 hours ago
Well, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs
a3w•about 3 hours ago
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.

Sharlin•about 1 hour ago
Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.
Narishma•about 1 hour ago
I played it back when it came out on a P166 in software mode and it was fine at that resolution.
andor•about 1 hour ago
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).
system2•about 1 hour ago
Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.
iberator•about 2 hours ago
nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)
Sharlin•about 1 hour ago
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.