Nokia N-Gage Working! (somewhat)

[Mr.Laor]

Hey Folks,

After a bunch of trial and error, I finally got N-Gage all set up. eka2l1 is a great emulator - and there is a helpful discord you can join. A bunch of games are pretty playable already - not all.

I've included a video to show how it turned out, links, some instructions, Unified platform video and theme files. 

1 - Watch this video (I'm sure there are others - but this one was very helpful and included links to everything you need to get started (emulator / BIOS / ROMs / good explanation)

 

2 - Then you need to install all the games to the emulator. This can take a while. Instructions in the video above.

3 - To set it up in Launchbox (I wouldn't be surprised if there is an easier way - feel free to find one)

I tried setting up the emulator in the "Emulator" section but then there are no ROMS or shortcuts to the games once installed.

So instead, I created shortcuts for each game that just pointed to the emulator but are named after the game  (this is time consuming - I hope someone figures out a better way). I installed them as "other" not ROMs - with no emulator.

Then for each individual game - I had to add command line instructions in the "Launching" tab -( --app <game name> --fullscreen)

This part was tricky to figure out - for <game name> - you have to load the emulator - go to launch app - and find the actual title used to launch the game. Sometimes they don't match the title of the game. For instance, Crash Nitro Kart - was actually - --app CNK --fullscreen - - I think with other ROM sets this might be easier - since these were cracked the names may have been changed. For instance, I couldn't get Rayman 3 to launch through command line - but when I got another copy from THE EYE - it worked fine.

I think that should be it. If you can think of a better way please let me know.

Edited January 21, 2021 by Mr.Laor

[zetec-s-joe]

What!! I Just got together a full ROM set for this a few days ago waiting for the day an emulator comes out! posting this before reading I am that excited! lol having owned one myself when I was about 16 years old this is one of the last emus I was for. Is it activly being worked on and going to get better? wow

[Mr.Laor]

Yup. The discord seems pretty active.

[zetec-s-joe]

Wow, thanks for posting. Your first link for instructions is not working btw

[Mr.Laor]

Thanks - fixed it.

[Old School]

Thanks you, I have been trying to set EK2L1 to work with Launchbox but I couldn't. I followed your steps and got some games to work through Launchbox but I got a problem with this step. 

17 hours ago, Mr.Laor said:

So instead, I created shortcuts for each game that just pointed to the emulator but are named after the game  (this is time consuming - I hope someone figures out a better way). I installed them as "other" not ROMs - with no emulator.

Then for each individual game - I had to add command line instructions in the "Launching" tab -( --app <game name> --fullscreen)

This part was tricky to figure out - for <game name> - you have to load the emulator - go to launch app - and find the actual title used to launch the game. Sometimes they don't match the title of the game. For instance, Crash Nitro Kart - was actually - --app CNK --fullscreen - - I think with other ROM sets this might be easier - since these were cracked the names may have been changed. For instance, I couldn't get Rayman 3 to launch through command line - but when I got another copy from THE EYE - it worked fine.

I cant get games with multiple words to work, such as; Tomb Raider. This is what I put (--app Tomb Raider --fullscreen), and this is the the error I keep getting.

[rexryan]

What i have done is install on games on the emulator e drive. created text files with the gameid name (Install as rom). used default command line --fullscreen --app quotes and file name only checked off

[Mr.Laor]

37 minutes ago, Old School said:

Thanks you, I have been trying to set EK2L1 to work with Launchbox but I couldn't. I followed your steps and got some games to work through Launchbox but I got a problem with this step. 

I cant get games with multiple words to work, such as; Tomb Raider. This is what I put (--app Tomb Raider --fullscreen), and this is the the error I keep getting.

People on discord helped - names with spaces need quotes around them "Tomb Raider" and it seems Letter Case (upper vs lower) also matters.

[Old School]

1 hour ago, Mr.Laor said:

People on discord helped - names with spaces need quotes around them "Tomb Raider" and it seems Letter Case (upper vs lower) also matters.

Thanks a lot.
Tried that and it works.

Edited January 22, 2021 by Old School

[Darkshade]

So having gone through the process of setting the N-Gage emulator up thanks to the advice in the Original Post, I thought I'd also try to give something back to help save people a lot of time (Windows Only).

So I created a rather rudimentary batch script to generate a full set of pre-named shortcuts to the EKA2L1 emulator, and have decided to share my platform XML. 

Here's a quick step by step:

- Set up your emulator and install your games into the EKA2L1 Emulator as per the advice given in the video linked in the original post or similar.

- Download this:

N-Gage_Shortcut_Creator.bat

and place it in the root directory of your emulator (where your eka2l1.exe can be found)

- Right click the eka2l1.exe and select 'Create Shortcut'.

You should now have a shortcut to the exe file named 'eka2l1.exe - Shortcut' 

If not, make sure it is named this.

- Run the 'N-Gage_Shortcut_Creator.bat'.

It should now output a folder full of pre-named shortcuts into a folder called 'Game Shortcuts' and also automatically delete the 'eka2l1.exe - Shortcut' file.

- Place these game shortcuts in whichever directory you'd like to run the games from.

- Import them into LaunchBox as ROMs under the Nokia N-Gage Platform but don't assign them an emulator.

- Close LaunchBox

- Download the following: 

Nokia N-Gage.xml

- Open it in your favourite text editor of choice capable of Find/Replace (I'd recommend Notepad++)

- Find (Ctrl+F) the following phrase: "REPLACE\THIS\DIRECTORY\" and replace it (Replace All) with the directory you placed your Game Shortcuts in earlier.

For example, mine is: C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts

Be sure to add a "\" on the end of the directory.

so "C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts" would become: "C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\"

- Once you have replaced all, save and close the 'Nokia N-Gage.xml' file.

- Copy the newly saved 'Nokia N-Gage.xml' file into your LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\ directory and overwrite the existing file.

 

You should now be able to launch all Nokia N-Gage games successfully through LaunchBox/BigBox.

Of course only those supported by the emulator will play successfully.

To play NCAA 2004 and X-Men legends you need to make sure you're using the latest version of the emulator.

Enjoy.

 

 

 

Edited February 5, 2021 by Darkshade

[SiriusVI]

Hey man, thanks for all the effort. I just tried the N-Gage_Shortcut_Creator, however it does not output the "Game Shortcuts" folder for me. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Edited February 6, 2021 by SiriusVI

[Darkshade]

11 hours ago, SiriusVI said:

Hey man, thanks for all the effort. I just tried the N-Gage_Shortcut_Creator, however it does not output the "Game Shortcuts" folder for me. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

As long as you've placed the shortcut creator in the same directory as the 'eka2l1.exe - Shortcut' file, it should work.

It may be a permissions issue, so you could try running the .bat file as an administrator.

 

That said however, I've since developed a better method as of last night, it is as follows:

- Set up your emulator and install your games into the EKA2L1 Emulator as per the advice given in the video linked in the original post or similar.

- Download the 'Command Line Files.zip' attached to this post.

These are not ROMs, they are simply blank files with the appropriate names to feed into the emulators command line.

- Extract these files to a location of your choosing.

- Import these files into LaunchBox as ROMs, and assign them EKA2L1 (eka2l1.exe) as an emulator.

It will need the following settings:

Make sure 'Use file only without file extension or folder path' is ticked.

In the default command line parameters, add the following:

--app %romfile% --fullscreen

 

- After they've been imported as ROMs and assigned the emulator, Close LaunchBox.

- Download the 'Nokia N-Gage.xml' file attached to this post (IGNORE THE ONE IN THE PREVIOUS POST)

- Open it in your favourite text editor of choice capable of Find/Replace (I'd recommend Notepad++)

- Find (Ctrl+F) the following phrase: "REPLACE\THIS\DIRECTORY\" and replace it (Replace All) with the directory you placed your Game Shortcuts in earlier.

For example, mine is: C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts

Be sure to add a "\" on the end of the directory.

so "C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts" would become: "C:\Users\Administrator\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\"

- Once you have replaced all, save and close the 'Nokia N-Gage.xml' file.

- Copy the newly saved 'Nokia N-Gage.xml' file into your LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\ directory and overwrite the existing file.

 

You should now be able to launch all Nokia N-Gage games successfully through LaunchBox/BigBox.

Of course only those supported by the emulator will play successfully.

To play NCAA 2004 and X-Men legends you need to make sure you're using the latest version of the emulator.

Enjoy.

 

 

Nokia N-Gage.xml Command Line Files.zip

Edited February 7, 2021 by Darkshade

[SiriusVI]

I've tried with admin rights, but it still didn't work. The bat file is placed in the root and the short cut is named correctly. Unless the output folder is being created somewhere else and I just don't find it, it didn't work for me.

I'll try your new metod later, though =). Thank you for that!

[Darkshade]

17 hours ago, SiriusVI said:

I've tried with admin rights, but it still didn't work. The bat file is placed in the root and the short cut is named correctly. Unless the output folder is being created somewhere else and I just don't find it, it didn't work for me.

I'll try your new metod later, though =). Thank you for that!

No worries, let me know how you get on.

[SiriusVI]

11 hours ago, Darkshade said:

No worries, let me know how you get on.

It worked great, thank you! ?

[cliffyb73]

This whole post helped me get it all working without having to search other tutorials or do a stupid amount of searching. Fantastic, thanks for all your efforts

 

P.S. I don't suppose you know how to get the TI99 working. Still the one platfrom that stumps me lol

Edited March 13, 2021 by cliffyb73

[Talphadogg]

Okay so this worked for me kind of, but still had issues with some games that I knew worked in the emulator outside of launchbox, but not when launched from launchbox. (Requiem from Hell for instance would launch when directly launched from the eka2l1 emulator but not from the files darkshade had provided in launchbox) Here's what I did to fix that issue and hopefully this helps someone in the future if they run into the same issues that I was having and thanks to Darkshade and Mr.Laor for all the info they and their posts on the subject provided. (Most of this post is basically a carbon copy just with tweaks to file names and condensed into one post)

1. Follow the guide to set up the emulator from the OP Video here. note: Of the Symbian OS' that he linked to in the description of the video the one that has best compatibility is RH-4 as the blzinstapp will actually work. I'm not sure if I can link it so Google is your best friend.

2. Once you have your emulator set up you need to have it set up in launchbox (under tools, manage emulators, add) and after you have put in the path the the executable and named your emulator, make sure to tick the box for "Use file only without file extension or folder path" and add in the default command line parameters this. 

                                       --app %romfile% --fullscreen

3. Download this folder of blank files and save them into a folder where you will be able to keep track of it.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Command Lines

The blank files will all have odd names like 0x101F402 and the reason for this is those are the App IDs for each game in the emulator and will correspond to the shortcuts that we will need to make in step four.

4. I altered Darkshade's .bat file to produce the shortcuts the same way it did before but with the correct App IDs. So to produce the shortcuts we will need download this .bat file and place in the root directory of your emulator with the eka2l1.exe program.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

You will need to create a shortcut to the emulator by right clicking eka2l1.exe and selecting create shortcut here. It will create a file called "eka2l1.exe - Shortcut" which is what we want. Run the "Ngage App ID Shortcut.bat" after you have created the shortcut to eka2l1.exe.

5. Take the Game shortcuts folder that has been produced in the root folder of your emulator

again this folder: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

and place it in the folder where you stored your command line folder from step 3. Now its time to import your games into launchbox. Import all the files from the command line folder you downloaded in step 3 as "Roms" and scrape for the platform "Nokia N-Gage". You will most likely not get any art work as the games will all be labeled the odd file names like 0x101f409 so don't panic.

6. Once all your games are imported close launchbox and Download this. It's a filled out platform xml file that needs to replace the one launchbox just created in LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\Nokia N-Gage.xml

Mine is under this: H:\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\

Once it has replaced the one launchbox made, open it with your favorite text editing program(I highly recommend Notepad++ because its free and great) and press "ctrl+F". In the options there should be a "find and replace" option with two bars to fill out. In the "find" bar copy

Replace\This\Directory

into it. Now we need to add what we are replacing it with, which will be the folder where you placed those command line files from step 3. The easiest way to do this is open windows explorer and navigate to the folder. Right click the address bar in the window and copy as text.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\

Note like Darkshade said earlier make sure you have the backslash on the end there. "\"

After its done finding and replacing just save the file as is. Open Launchbox and all the games should have the correct meta data and names. Feel free to scrap the art work now.

Now as far as I know there are a few games that A)Do not work correctly, B)Do not have box art/meta data, C)only work on certain Symbian Operating systems like RH-4. I have only tested all the games I have on two of them (RH-4 and RH-29) but I compiled a list of working and not working with app IDs into this Excel sheet and maybe it will help others in getting the rest of the library to work correctly. That excel sheet can be found here. 

I hope this helps someone and again thank you to both Mr. Laor and Darkshade for all the info and work they put into this! Cheers everyone.

[SiriusVI]

On 4/27/2021 at 7:17 AM, Talphadogg said:

Okay so this worked for me kind of, but still had issues with some games that I knew worked in the emulator outside of launchbox, but not when launched from launchbox. (Requiem from Hell for instance would launch when directly launched from the eka2l1 emulator but not from the files darkshade had provided in launchbox) Here's what I did to fix that issue and hopefully this helps someone in the future if they run into the same issues that I was having and thanks to Darkshade and Mr.Laor for all the info they and their posts on the subject provided. (Most of this post is basically a carbon copy just with tweaks to file names and condensed into one post)

1. Follow the guide to set up the emulator from the OP Video here. note: Of the Symbian OS' that he linked to in the description of the video the one that has best compatibility is RH-4 as the blzinstapp will actually work. I'm not sure if I can link it so Google is your best friend.

2. Once you have your emulator set up you need to have it set up in launchbox (under tools, manage emulators, add) and after you have put in the path the the executable and named your emulator, make sure to tick the box for "Use file only without file extension or folder path" and add in the default command line parameters this. 

                                       --app %romfile% --fullscreen

3. Download this folder of blank files and save them into a folder where you will be able to keep track of it.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Command Lines

The blank files will all have odd names like 0x101F402 and the reason for this is those are the App IDs for each game in the emulator and will correspond to the shortcuts that we will need to make in step four.

4. I altered Darkshade's .bat file to produce the shortcuts the same way it did before but with the correct App IDs. So to produce the shortcuts we will need download this .bat file and place in the root directory of your emulator with the eka2l1.exe program.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

You will need to create a shortcut to the emulator by right clicking eka2l1.exe and selecting create shortcut here. It will create a file called "eka2l1.exe - Shortcut" which is what we want. Run the "Ngage App ID Shortcut.bat" after you have created the shortcut to eka2l1.exe.

5. Take the Game shortcuts folder that has been produced in the root folder of your emulator

again this folder: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

and place it in the folder where you stored your command line folder from step 3. Now its time to import your games into launchbox. Import all the files from the command line folder you downloaded in step 3 as "Roms" and scrape for the platform "Nokia N-Gage". You will most likely not get any art work as the games will all be labeled the odd file names like 0x101f409 so don't panic.

6. Once all your games are imported close launchbox and Download this. It's a filled out platform xml file that needs to replace the one launchbox just created in LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\Nokia N-Gage.xml

Mine is under this: H:\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\

Once it has replaced the one launchbox made, open it with your favorite text editing program(I highly recommend Notepad++ because its free and great) and press "ctrl+F". In the options there should be a "find and replace" option with two bars to fill out. In the "find" bar copy

Replace\This\Directory

into it. Now we need to add what we are replacing it with, which will be the folder where you placed those command line files from step 3. The easiest way to do this is open windows explorer and navigate to the folder. Right click the address bar in the window and copy as text.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\

Note like Darkshade said earlier make sure you have the backslash on the end there. "\"

After its done finding and replacing just save the file as is. Open Launchbox and all the games should have the correct meta data and names. Feel free to scrap the art work now.

Now as far as I know there are a few games that A)Do not work correctly, B)Do not have box art/meta data, C)only work on certain Symbian Operating systems like RH-4. I have only tested all the games I have on two of them (RH-4 and RH-29) but I compiled a list of working and not working with app IDs into this Excel sheet and maybe it will help others in getting the rest of the library to work correctly. That excel sheet can be found here. 

I hope this helps someone and again thank you to both Mr. Laor and Darkshade for all the info and work they put into this! Cheers everyone.

I tried your Setup. I don't see any difference in performance to the previous method, though. The games that worked with @Darkshade's method wh your setup. The ones that didn't work before, don't work with our new setup. I also don't know why you need the shortcuts from the "Game Shortcuts" folder. The games work fine without them. I may have put them in the wrong folder though. Your tutorial was a bit confusing on that part. You wrote:

 

Take the Game shortcuts folder that has been produced in the root folder of your emulator [...] and place it in the folder where you stored your command line folder from step 3.

 

Closely following your instructions gives me the following paths:

1. L:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Command Lines\ ---> here are all the files from your command line archives. These files were imported into Launchbox.

2. L:\LaunchBox\L:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game ShortcutsGames\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\ --> here are all the shortcuts that your batch created. But nothing points to these files, so they are basically useless.

 

Again, I don't know if this is the correct setup. Maybe you can tell me what I did wrong.

Edited May 30, 2021 by SiriusVI

[DerSchlachter]

 

On 2/7/2021 at 10:21 AM, SiriusVI said:

I've tried with admin rights, but it still didn't work. The bat file is placed in the root and the short cut is named correctly. Unless the output folder is being created somewhere else and I just don't find it, it didn't work for me.

I'll try your new metod later, though =). Thank you for that!

Same her, i edit the bat "echo d | xcopy /y /f "%var%\eka2l1_qt.exe - Shortcut.lnk" "%var%\Game Shortcuts\Alien Front.lnk"" and it creates the Shortcuts everything works now @DarkshadeThx for all!

[DerSchlachter]

One more reply, i try out a bunch of games, some games wont start, because the file is not correct named. Maybe the Problem is the Rom-Set, If you have already imported the files, you have to update the path in launchbox, which of course still leads to the old file name.

Change  in the Command Line folder the following Files, 

Atari I -> Atari MP Vol I

Atari II -> Atari MP Vol II

CMR2005 -> colin mcrae rally 2005

CNK -> CrashNitroKart

KOF-EXT -> KOF EXTREME (dont start)

I will try more games now