Nokia N900 Runs webOS Games on Video

The Nokia N900, the last Maemo-based smartphone Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia brought to the market, has been caught in the wild playing along with some games developed for Palm's webOS platform.

While things might seem very complicated when putting together the Maemo-based Nokia N900 and the webOS platform from Palm, the truth is that they actually are much simpler, as a recent article on Engadget notes.

It all starts from the fact that Palm and Nokia support similar methods of developing native Linux applications, namely SDL 1.2.

Moreover, the Palm Pre and Nokia N900 come with similar hardware (OMAP3430, PowerVR SGX, Open GL ES 2.0 support), something that enables enthusiasts to come up with some appealing cross-platform gaming solution.

The package that enables these unmodified webOS games to run on Nokia N900 is called “Preenv” 0.1, and comes with no graphical interface, which means that users would have to install it from command line.

“To get games, grab your Pre and copy your application storage directory out of it (that depends on your version of WebOS and requires rooting it, so it is out of the scope of this little post). Then copy it into your N900's home directory (note: /home/user !, not MyDocs),” a post on Maemo.org notes.

Users would have to root the Palm Pre to access the games, and the sale applies to Nokia N900, in case there are some interested in making a launch icon for the game.

“To enter the "Pre environment", just type "preenv" on the terminal. This will spawn another shell with the correct LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Now you can try running your games as if they were native applications (they are!). They all run fullscreen; quit them using Ctrl+Backspace,” the said post continues.

Those interested in learning some more info on this should head over to talk.maemo.org here.