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!
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol
I would love to play Doom while I am playing Doom one day..
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.
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
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).
What scripting system?
Everything's open source in the age of LLM-assisted Ghidra...
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.
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.
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.
Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.
> 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.
Now instead of Doom we prescribe Half-Life. Is it worth waiting for the new rule "Half-Life works everywhere"?
Probably not until it's open source. Quake 2 instead?
Well, there's always… https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs
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.
Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.
Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.
nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)
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.