ngage-toolchain

A C/C++ homebrew toolchain for the Nokia N-Gage.

What is this all about?

This toolchain is the heart of the Nokia N-Gage SDK project. A development environment for the easy development of homebrew software for the Nokia N-Gage using modern tools such as CMake and Visual Studio 2022.

The problem

Developing applications for Symbian is unnecessarily complicated. This was no different 20 years ago than it is today, and is certainly one of the main reasons why a homebrew community never emerged for the Nokia N-Gage.

Until now, the easiest way to do this was to set up a virtual machine, install the SDK and a completely outdated version of Visual Studio.

In short, Symbian development has never been a convenient thing.

The solution

CMake, as it allows you to automate complex build procedures very effortlessly and without fuss. This toolchain also includes a native port of Simple DirectMedia Layer 3, which eases access to audio and graphics, amongst other things.

Where do I start?

Clone the toolchain:

git clone https://github.com/ngagesdk/ngage-toolchain.git

Create the environment variable $NGAGESDK and set it to the root-directory of the toolchain.
Important: Since normalizing paths with CMake does not seem to work properly, be sure to use slashes instead of backslashes, e.g. C:/ngage-toolchain.

Once you are done, open the setup directory in Visual Studio and wait until the CMake solution has finished generating. Then build the project so that the necessary dependencies are downloaded and installed.

Important

The C++ compiler for Symbian S60 is based on Cygwin and requires access to cygwin1.dll. In order for this DLL to be found, the $PATH environment variable must be updated.

The same applies to the C compiler, which, however, requires access to different DLLs.

It should be sufficient to add these two paths to your $PATH environment variable:

%NGAGESDK%\sdk\sdk\6.1\Shared\EPOC32\gcc\bin
%NGAGESDK%\sdk\sdk\6.1\Shared\EPOC32\ngagesdk\bin

Licence and Credits

• This project is licensed under the "The MIT License". See the file LICENSE.md for details.

• The N-Gage SDK logo by Dan Whelan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

If you are interested in the Nokia N-Gage in general, you are cordially invited to visit our small online community. You can find us on Discord and Telegram.