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Review of Frodofor the Nokia 9210

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Frodo is the first emulator to be ported to the Nokia 9210. You can download the SIS file from the downloads page. In this review Russ Spooner (www.interrorem.com/) runs the program through it paces and gives us some information on how to use it (its abit tricky to start with, but it works well!). Thanks to him for the information. You can view Frodo's entry in the software directory here.

Frodo is the first emulator that I know of that has been ported to or written for the 9210!

Here is a snippet from the help file, (which is actually HTML and is located in \system\apps\e32frodo\):

"Frodo is a Commodore 64 emulator written by Christian Bauer for Amiga, and ported to Epoc32 by Jal Panvel & Alfred E. Heggestad in the period Nov. 1999 to Jan 2000.

Frodo is also ported to many other platforms, inluding Win32, Unix, Linux, BeOS, etc.

Frodo is free, and the source code is free. You are welcome to edit and improve this piece of software if you have a need for it. Look in References at the bottom for more info.

Feedback to [email protected]"

In short here are a list of the Important (as far as I am concerned) features of this port:

  • Formats supported: d64 (Commodore 64 disk images: see www.c64.com for a few examples)
  • 1541 emulation (c64 disk drive) Many disks are available
  • No sound (yet)
  • Joystick (switch it on in the preferences and then use caps lock to toggle the cursor keys to act as the joystick)
  • It's fast enough to run gauntlet fine :)

A couple of pointers when using it:

SHIFT-ESC acts as RUN/STOP
CHR-A acts as F1
CHR-B acts as F2
and so on...

To load a game you choose the 1541 tab in "preferences" and then use "get file" to specify a disk image for one of the virtual disk drives.

The you can press SHIFT-ESC to run whatever is on the disk!

As is normal with emulators, most of them anyway, some games work, others don't... you just have to try and see. Leaving the preferences at their default for the most part seems to work fine.

Another important factor when trying to determine which games work is that there are probably 20 or 30 different images of the game you are trying to run! If a game doesn't seem to work after you have fiddled with it for a while, try downloading it from somewhere else...

Don't fret if you can't find a game in the right (*.d64) format, many PC (i.e. for the desktop) emulators allow you to save between formats so you can effectively convert the games to the format that suits you.

Of course, this means that you will be able to program in basic on your 9210 albeit using Commodore Basic!

On the whole I had great fun with this, the emulated screen is quite useable on the 9210 and is clear enough to play all you old favourites on!

Overall I give it a cool 8 out of 10. The additional 2 points will come when additional image formats are supported and when sound is enabled!

Congratulations are due to the Porter!

Thanks to Russ for that!

There are 100's of programs, games, utilities and even OS's available for the Commodore 64 and the emulator runs them all at a good speed. For more information on C64 and its emulation visit http://www.c64.com. An alternative is a visit to the Commodore 8 bit sever at http://www.hut.fi/Misc/cbm/. You could also visit the port's homepage at http://www.edmund.roland.org/e32frodo/.

Copyright (©) Rafe Blandford 2000-2001    |     Last modified: September 19 2001.

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