I’ve received some questions and would like to post the answers right here in case others are wondering the same things about the N900:
Yes, the memory on the device is partitioned so that you have around 1.5GB or so for applications, and the rest for data (images, videos, music, maps, software you use with DOSBox, etc.)
To install Dosbox you have to add one or all of the extras repositories in your device App manager: extras, extras-devel, extras-testing. More instructions about that are available at: https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras
I did some tweaking and uploaded a faster Windows 3.11 running on N900-video to Youtube. The most important changes were setting frameskip=6 in dosbox preferences and installing of S3 video drivers in Windows, which had a huge difference in speed. I would have liked to test how well it would have worked with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but I still don’t have any to try it with.
For laughs, I just had to try running Windows 3.11 using Dosbox on the N900.. worked ok except for the mouse cursor, which was simply all over the place, so I used X11VNC for controlling the mouse remotely..
UpdateI changed Dosbox settings to use Frameskip=2 and now it’s running faster, though still not fast.
Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading game
Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any
production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around
(though I’m not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request
if someone really wants.)
Try to get the screen centered (already happens in fullscreen)
Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)
I have posted my Maemo Summit 2009 photos on flickr. If someone remembers I’m that guy with the weird old-fashioned film camera.. (click picture to open set.)
I have made an initial unofficial build of ScummVM for the N900. It seems to work OK.
It requires some additional packages, all of which are available in the extras, extras-devel or extras-testing repositories, such as: libsdl, libmad, libvorbisidec, libflac, libasound.
All I really did was:
Apply the supplied patch for the N810 (Maemo 4) devices and added the -lX11 flag to linking, since otherwise it could not find the symbol XStoreName which comes from libX11.
Add RX-51 (=N900) into the list of keyboard-equipped Maemo devices in the part where it figures whether or not it’s running on a keyboard-equipped device or not
Fix the window focus – due to a Fremantle SDL bug (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5153)
you couldn’t use the keyboard at all since all keypresses went to
wherever you launched Scummvm from (homescreen -> calls up the
Contacts page, xterm -> keypresses appear on command line) otherwise.
I would like to stress out that this is completely based on the previous Maemo porting work and all I did was the abovementioned things on top of that.
Now that I have this running, things to do would be (in no particular order):
Figure out which parts of the Maemo 4 patch are still a) necessary b) working anymore. At least the part that adds the application into the launch menu is still working. The part about bypassing GCC 3.x bugs may not be.
Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading games
change the default directory to /home/user/MyDocs (or something) when adding new games
Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around (though I’m not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request if someone really wants.)
Try to get the screen centered
Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)
Enable fullscreen mode with some key combo
Things I don’t think I’ll be able to solve:
Music playback is sometimes choppy
The file selector dialog is not very usable on a touchscreen device