It will be a reality soon.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/jslinux-lin ... 11228.html

It's early, and basically only emulates a 486 at the moment, but it's a step in the right direction.

Would be nice to see obsidian on my phone, since it says it works with android and what not.

obsi on fone = death lol

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king of the run on sentence.

yeh, id be on it all the damn time lol

no i ment u gonna die fast as hell if u played on ur fone
since when does death = a good thing? gosh u young hipsters and ur fadangled slang

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king of the run on sentence.

haha... I would welcome it to go on the phone. I need all the advantage over people I cant get!

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make it a touch screen app then we good to go

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Scathach of Skye - Pure Ranger

Interesting thread!

Microsoft are planning on releasing Windows 8 for ARM processors (e.g Samsung/Qualcomm processors in Android handsets, as well as the processors found in iPhone/iPad).

However Intel have just said that it won't retain compatibility with legacy (x86) applications, but Microsoft have said not everything Intel has press released is accurate so it will be interesting to wait and see.

In short, Obsidian cannot run natively on the majority of smartphone platforms as they are ARM not x86, so the only potential solution is emulation. This emulator is in very early stages and emulation is inherently slow anyway and ridiculously problematic when it comes to application support; especially if the emulator itself is not running natively (this one is running in a browser via js).

My personal view is that the first opportunity you're going to get to play Obsidian on a mobile phone is when Intel enter the smartphone market with a 'proper' smartphone x86 offering. That way, it would be possible to run a true x86 operating system on it natively.

I'd also love to see a virtual machine 'app' up and running on such a device, which would of course allow you to run just about anything you want.

I'm currently running a 10GB Windows XP Professional virtual machine within Windows 7, and I'd love to see it up and running on a mobile device!

Maybe I'm wrong, and you'll see Obsidian running on ARM first through another method? Will be interesting to see...

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Thassius
"Blessed are the noobs, for they shall inherit Obsidian" - Thassius

The first steps will be running programs in a browser window. The latest version of internet explorer takes advantage of graphics cards for far more processing power. Once this feature becomes common with all web software I think we will see browsers acting more as emulators and stand alone operating systems. The Chrome operating system is pioneering this technology now, but support is limited. I give it 2 years before we can run stand-alone X86 and old DOS software in an emulated browser window.

The ARM instruction set is easily emulated on using an X86 processor (and vice versa), but there's no arm PCs at Best Buy as of yet, so development in that area will be lagging behind browsers....for now. Once ARM processors begin to appear in home desktops, emulation within a web browser will quickly become obsolete....and you guys can play obsidian on your Android ver.4.8 3Ghz hexi-core Droid X4 phones.

I wish battery technology had progressed at the same rate as processor technology! I guess part of the problem is that emulation is decidedly more intensive than running native applications.

My personal feeling is that smartphones are going to evolve more along the parallel processing route (e.g. nvidia CUDA type stuff) because (as nvidia helpfully demonstrated recently) spreading processing load across multiple cores is much more power and heat efficient than increasing clock frequency.

Unless battery technology gets a massive boost with terminator-style power cores etc, that is going to be the greatest bottleneck to high-ghz mobile processors. Manufacturers are going to be working more on intelligent architectures, efficient memory and parallel processing via the GPU than increasing clock speeds significantly any time soon. Just my prediction anyway! It took several years just to get from 650mhz processors to 1ghz in the mobile space.

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Thassius
"Blessed are the noobs, for they shall inherit Obsidian" - Thassius

This is really interesting stuff to me anyway... thanks for the thread!

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Thassius
"Blessed are the noobs, for they shall inherit Obsidian" - Thassius

This is not new, but it will be only a matter of time before it's integrated into cell pones.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/

There's also work being done on a virtual mouse that works similar to the movement controls of the Wii, Xbox and PS3. It will be interesting to see how this will work out. I give it 10 years before the movement is to the point that it can replace a mouse entirely....which is a lifetime in tech terms. By then something better will likely be along.

Battery life is an issue...a huge issue, but cell phones can be plugged into a wall. When I'm on the road and staying in hotels, it's not a big deal to plug in my phone to use it to it's full potential.

The screen size is the real limiting factor, IMO. Until cell phones can project high rez displays on a wall or OLEDs becomes flexible enough to roll a screen up like a scroll, we will be limited to about a 5 inch screen. I'd rather not play obsidian on a 5 inch display....I can barely see Black Perl as it is.

I remember selling those keyboards lol... great idea but worked really badly in practise

Interestingly enough, I read about some tech the other day that gives motion sensing and kinect-style controls using the webcam built in to the front of the device. The device can track relative movement of itself (or gestures) using the web cam. Hopefully that kind of tech will give the sort of mouse control that you've described.

You're right, it is possible to plug in a phone to give the juice for increased clockspeed - although the other important factor to remember is the thermal envelope constraints of mobile devices which is another big limitation on just bumping up the clockspeed.

The big advantage that Intel have over ARM right now is in fab; I think they're almost down to 14nm now (new fab in the pipeline), and each time they lower it they can get more clockspeed out of a given TDP threshold. However IBM have said they're going to work with ARM on their own 14nm fab.

It will be very interesting to see what clock speeds they can hit with 14nm, as from what I've read it will be difficult for them to go any further than that.

In terms of screen size, I think you're right again... I do think there is a place for mobile gaming, but for more sophisticated apps the tablet will probably become king. We're already seeing very capable mobile graphics chips in the tablet space from nvidia, and even more so from AMD soon too. Tablets have already destroyed the netbook industry, and cannibalised a large portion of the standard laptop form factor sales too.

I think the Motorola Atrix is a very interesting concept that you can connect it to other things. Maybe the 'ultimate' device will have all the features we've described. A powerful, multi-core, parrallel-processing smartphone with a sophisticated processor, that can be docked with a larger display and mains charger to scale significantly in power. Maybe that will never happen as Apple (the prime catalyst behind the recent explosion of both industries) makes more money keeping them separate. We shall see.

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Thassius
"Blessed are the noobs, for they shall inherit Obsidian" - Thassius

I picked up my new phone a few weeks ago...evo 3d. Dual core 1.2Ghz. I've been waiting to flash a custom rom until some more information was available on how to obtain root access. The time has come....I'm going to root my phone tonight.

Android runs on a Linux kernel, and I've heard of people flashing an upgraded kernel to their 3VO that allows them to launch a full version of Ubuntu from within android.

I've read that Android can also work with a Wii controller (with the working motion sensing). I have not tried it, but I have a GUI overlay that is causing problems with the wii controller. Once I obtain root access I can remove that GUI overlay and I can try it out.

If I can get both of these items to work together....and I can get Obsidian to run in wine or naively through Ubuntu, then playing this game on my cell phone to it's full potential just took a few steps closer to reality.......I set my chances at less then 5%, but it's a chance.