I don’t think I need to introduce Nebulus to anyone older than, say, 30-35 years – it was one of the best games written by no one else than Hewson (later: Graftgold), the developer of other, similarly nice titles as Paradroid and Uridium; two really excellent home computer games (and, as you can except from any Hewson titles, it was blazingly fast on the Commodore 64). If you really don’t know the genre, I REALLY recommend you download the desktop version HERE, unzip it to any directory on your desktop’s hard disk, start toppler.exe and engage playing. I also recommend this add-on MP3 file - just copy it in the home directory of the game and (re)start it. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.

Now that BYTE@HAND has just released their Nebulus clone Towers Tricks, I’ve found it important to finally publish a full (!) roundup of Nebulus ports on Windows Mobile, particularly because there is a REAL, free gem almost noone has ever heard of; that is, n0p’s Tower Toppler port.

n0p’s Tower Toppler

First and foremost, the first port you should give a try to is the Windows Mobile port of the well-known Tower Toppler project.



The game has been ported to Windows Mobile by noone else than n0p, who is really famous for some of his other ports; for example, Genesis Plus/Pocket PC, PocketSNES, DOSBox and Stratagus – four well-known emulators. (DO check out his homepage and Google for user remarks on the other stuff he’s ported to Windows Mobile!)

This port is, in my opinion, the best available Nebulus clone. After downloading the new, ARM version, decompress it (WinRAR will handle the .7z file just fine). If you decompress it on the desktop and, then, transfer the files to your PDA, make sure you transfer the uncompressed files to your PDA directly, via ActiveSync (with either File Explorer or the WinCE file system plug-in of Total Commander). Then, just run toppler.exe.

Otherwise, if you copy the files to a storage card in a card reader and try to run toppler.exe, the game will not run and will display a (null) message at the top as can also be seen in here. This is caused by the file copying’ automatically converting all files to uppercase characters. You can only fix this by renaming all (but at least m1 – it contains the first few maps) .ttm files to their lowercase equivalents from either Resco File Explorer (after letting it display file extensions too) or Total Commander, both run on the PDA. This requires a lot of work (you need to manually rename all files); therefore, whenever possible, try using the ActiveSync-based file copy method I’ve explained above.

The game runs just great; the only problem is that you can’t directly enter the map code in the Options dialog on a device without a built-in keyboard (devices with built-in keyboards work just great; I’ve tested this on my Wizard), should you want to jump to a map directly. Then, you will want to add a row (or edit it, if it’s already in there) in the file .toppler.rc containing

password: "cxt"

where change cxt to the map code you’d like to jump to.

Also note that you can freely delete / hide the .ttm map files as you wish. Should you want to get rid of the first few maps, get rid of m1.ttm and so on. You can also see what maps are contained in a given file by quickly peeking in them; they contain the map names also displayed at the start of each map.

I haven’t encountered any problems on any of my test devices (x51v, hx4700 WM5 2.01, Universal, WM2003 iPAQ 2210, HTC Wizard etc.) running the game.

The Windows Mobile version doesn’t differ much from the desktop version – other than it doesn’t make use of high-resolution of (W)VGA devices. But, at least, it’s really quick and responsive – even on “slow” TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile models (for example, the HTC Wizard) running at the factory default 195 MHz. The other titles in this roundup (particularly the Palm OS Nebulus) exhibit quite remarkable choppiness at lower CPU speeds.

Note that while the desktop version is able to initiate playing back the in-game music (conveniently offered as a downloadable add-on MP3 file), the Windows Mobile version is unable to make use of it. However, you can play it back in any player in the background, it won’t have any bad effect on the gameplay or the in-game sounds. This isn’t the case with the other two titles, however.

(P.S. I’d like to thank AximSite forum member DaLabrador for pointing out the n0p port has a filename capitalization problem.)

Towers Tricks

The second title you may want to check out is BYTE@HAND’s brand new Nebulus-alike Towers Tricks. Unlike the other two titles, it’s not trying to mimic the original Nebulus as closely as possible. While the towers are exactly the same, the sprites and the background are different and there are weather effects (fortunately, the latter can be switched off).



A unique feature of the game is that it’s compatible with ALL the available operating systems – yes, even PPC2k2 and, yeah, MIPS / SH3 PPC2k! Note that while the game is compatible with even MIPS / SH3-based, very old Pocket PC 2000 models, you probably won’t want to play the game on these devices (unless you have an E-750 overclocked to 290 MHz) – it’ll be far too slow (yes, I’ve tested this on my 150 MHz E-125). Unfortunately, the same stands for the 206 MHz StrongARM-based PPC2k2 iPAQ 36xx series: the game runs pretty slow, even when overclocked to 236 MHz. On my other test Pocket PC’s (400 MHz PXA255 HP iPAQ 2210, HTC Wizard with dynamically scaled CPU speed, Dell Axim x51v), it runs OK. Speaking of the Wizard, with the CPU speed at the factory default of 195 MHz, it’s still playable, but stutters now and them.

Incidentally, the game initially sold at $19.95. At that price, I wouldn’t have recommended it at all. The price was reduced to a much more friendly $9.95. While I still recommend n0p’s free Tower Toppler to it, at this price, you may also ant to give it a test ride.

Note that the game doesn’t utilize the high resolution of VGA devices – as is the case with the n0p port.

Finally,

The Palm OS version of Nebulus run under the StyleTap Palm emulator

If you already have these two pieces of software, your Windows Mobile device is powerful enough (after all, emulation needs a lot of CPU power) and you don’t want to take a look at the alternatives (you should, most importantly to the free and very cool n0p port!). With the current version (v1.0.025) of StyleTap, the REAL Palm OS emulator for Windows Mobile, the game is running OK too.



A remark to VGA users: you will want to use the hi-res Palm OS 5 version (Nebulus_PalmOS_5.prc) instead of the low-res POS 3/4 one(s). Note that you must switch the emulator to 66% screen mode so that you won’t have graphics problems during emulation.

A quick chart



Verdict

As I’ve emphasized, I think you will want to give a try to the n0p port first. It’s free, fast, doesn’t chew through your batteries and is a perfect remake of the original Nebulus.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

This 30+ year old say you are a star... guess what my plans are for the rest of the day

This week I have been mostly listening to..... Short cummings audio

Life — In Funny, Six-Minute Slices

     

Now, if someone would just port Metroid, then I could get on with reliving my entire childhood.

Thanks, Meneisyys.

Doug

Check out all of my hardware and software reviews exclusively at Just Another Mobile Monday and Gear Diary

    

Play Nebulus?

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.