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N-Gage

N-Gage is a 2003 game console by Nokia, powered by the Series 60 version 1. At the core, it's just a phone running Symbian OS with some exclusive functionalities.

This page is intended to laid out the road of getting the emulator running, for those who exclusively want to try out this phone.

Obtaining the N-Gage system ROM

For those who are used to Nitendo/PlayStation game consoles, consider this ROM as a BIOS. The emulator relies on this to run N-Gage games.

If you have an N-Gage, you can dump this ROM yourself. Here is the method:

  1. Compile and obtain the Symbian Dumper EXE from Rusty Starship by Raul Tambre

  2. Copy the EXE onto your MMC card.

  3. Insert the MMC card into the N-Gage.

  4. Use a File Explorer like FE Explore or X-plore and copy the EXE to somewhere in the C: drive

  5. Run the copied EXE. The ROM, BOOT and ROOT should be dumped in the MMC card.

  6. Access the MMC card on computer and obtain only the ROM file. Rename it to SYM.ROM

Install N-Gage device from ROM

Using the ROM obtained, install the device using the ROM + RPKG method.

Note

Using this method, you just need to browse to the ROM. For ease, name the ROM as SYM.ROM. If it asked you for RPKG, contact the developer for support.

Install N-Gage games

N-Gage game files sit on MMC card, unprotected in FAT32 filesystem. There is usually two types of game version you might have access to:

  • Patched games: These games are patched by hacker to bypass DRM. Most of the times they will be very thoughtful to disable multiplayer and N-Gage Arena too, to encourage you to buy the game after trying out the patch.

  • DRM-ed game: These games rely on the presence of a physical MMC card to check for its MMC-ID, to see if the game is contained on a copied-card or not sit on a MMC card at all. The executable of the game is obsfucated so that reverse engineering is harder. Most of N-Gage libraries do this.

For Patched games, see install instructions here.

For DRM-ed game, in the future, planned AAru support should simplify the play process. But for now, there is no way to install them. See the next section on how to play them.

Play DRM-ed N-Gage games

EKA2L1 provides some method to simulate the MMC environment. To play authenticate DRM-protected games on the emulator:

  1. Edit the MMC-ID to have the same value as on a real MMC-ID card contains the game you want to play. There are some written applications that can do this extraction. Please contact the emulator developers on interest.

    • On Android, open the upper-right menu, and go to Settings/System. Edit the MMC ID setting here.

    • On Desktop, open the config.yml, which is in your current running directory (on Windows, it should be in the same folder as the EXE). Edit or add the MMC-ID key-value pair. Here is an example:

          mmc-id: 00000000-00000000-00000000-00000000

  2. Mount the game folder. The root of the game folder should contains a System folder.

    • On Android, open the upper-right menu, and choose Mount MMC/SD card

    • On Desktop, go to File/Mount game card dump/Folder, and browse to the folder you want to mount.

      • Note that the Folder field shows the name of the current folder. If the field shows System, it is not valid. But the emulator will put out a warning for you if that happens.

N-Gage game card dialog

Mount game card dump window

Note

Due to scoped storage change on Android, running the mounted game will take a long time to startup and might freeze in the way.

The game should appear in the application list if there's no problem. You can click on the game icon to play.