It's an inauspicious anniversary, but the N-Gage is not as awful as its reputation would suggest. It was wrong-headed in its design, with an over-encumbered button layout and a tiny vertically oriented screen, but it could push polygons in a way no other handheld of the time could, particularly the Game Boy Advance....
A fun, informative and irreverent romp through the history of more than 40 pieces of personal tech, charting the successes, failures and oddities from over five decades of our obsession with gadgetry.
Revived a #Nokia N-Gage QD Proto F4.0 that was once property of #Sega of America. Sadly, it had its flash memory wiped already when I got it. Had to wipe it again to re-install the firmware. But at least it's working now. 🙂
Some people try to rip off others by trying to sell a ridiculously "graded" copy of Virtua Cop for the #Nokia N-Gage for 3.000 bucks, while others have enough luck to get it for a very reasonable price...
Patience is key - don't feed the greedy resellers.
We were sent this picture of a still-sealed manual for the game "Space Impact" for the Nokia N-Gage. Context is unknown, but we wanted to share it anyway. 😀
Gameplay footage of "8 Kings" by Argonaut Games for the #Nokia N-Gage. Showing the E3 Alpha Demo, the game was never released in the end. Big thanks to Martin Piper for digging out this and two other builds of the game.
For anyone who wants to play around with that E3 demo of 8 Kings: I made a fixed version that runs correctly from a memory card (the original build runs from internal storage only).
Had the game been released in 2004 as planned, this would have been my cover artwork for it.
As with all my custom covers, I'll do a limited print run of it (50 copies most likely). The text on the back is probably going to change slightly before printing, since it wasn't written well in the design docs.
If you are interested in getting a copy, be sure to bookmark this post. I'll update it once the covers are available.
Did you know that the #Nokia N-Gage had a provision to attach a hand strap originally? This was dropped after the F4.0 #prototype, presumably because the hole could be misinterpreted as being the mic.
Here's the next one from the lot: This is an N-Gage B5.3. Very happy to own one of these, as it is a development unit, not just an early prototype. It has final hardware (most important: 16 MB of RAM) and final 3.x firmware. But the firmware is DSK-enabled, so it will bypass the copy protection when using DSK MMCs. 🥳
And then there is this one, the second F6.0 in the lot. Rather boring, except that it says "Series 60" at boot, which none of my other protos does. Compatibility is still limited by only 8 MB of RAM on this unit.
Did you know that the #Nokia N-Gage QD had more colors planned than the five ones that were actually released?
At least two more colors were made as samples, but never made it past that. These are: white/silver and white/gold. Enjoy these exclusive, never-shown-before pictures kindly sent to me some time ago by a former Nokia employee.
Got an early Nokia N-Gage press disc dated January 2003, which implies that the Tomb Raider game for the system was originally planned to be based on The Angel of Darkness. Could explain Lara's outfit in the game we finally got.
After having had the B4.1 #beta of #Pandemonium! for the #Nokia N-Gage for quite some time, I finally got my hands on the B5.2 card as well. Another one to remove from my wanted list. 🙂
Label is rather worn, but given the rarety of those cards, I can live with that.
Celebrating the finding of the last item on my #Nokia N-Gage wanted list. 🥳 This is the B3 release of Space Impact Evolution X. There was a physical release of B3.2 as well, but I'm not going to hunt for that. This is it - I'm pretty much done with collecting for the N-Gage now. The few known items I still miss don't interest me much.
If you ever come across this #Nokia N-Gage B2.0 #prototype unit (previously owned by Jamie from StuffWePlay), inform German police - case number is 042015/03072022/1609. Alternatively, you can contact us if for whatever reason you don't feel comfortable with contacting the police.
This device was subject to fraud and should be considered #stolen. Whoever owns it right now is not the legal owner of it.
@ngage I'm the legal owner of that prototype. I offer a reward of 1.000€ for returning this device to me, or 500€ for any information that results in returning the device to me (the return needs to actually happen to claim the reward).
Whoever is in possession of this prototype right now should know he's not legally owning it and will be tracked down sooner or later.
Twenty years of taco talkin': The N-Gage celebrates its 20th anniversary (www.timeextension.com)
It's an inauspicious anniversary, but the N-Gage is not as awful as its reputation would suggest. It was wrong-headed in its design, with an over-encumbered button layout and a tiny vertically oriented screen, but it could push polygons in a way no other handheld of the time could, particularly the Game Boy Advance....