Gaming on the E90


To start off my first review, allow me to introduce one of my most favorite applications, Vampent vBagX the GameBoy Advance Emulator.

Software Download
The demo version can be downloaded here

Unregistered version has the full functions except of following limitations:
1. Limited time for playing
2. Cannot save/load

My Review
In my opinion, I think that most Symbian or Java games are too short and have little replay value. Because of this, emulators are very important for those who want to play games on their mobile devices. By downloading Roms (I'm not going to post any download links) and storing them in a memory card, a gamer could literally have hundreds of games at their fingertips. Well, depending on the size of their memory card of course.

The E90 is almost perfect for gaming because of its wide screen display and keyboard. In the past, I have tested this emulator on my N73. The speed was fine but the display was too small for certain games which had a lot of text to read. Apart from that, the controls felt a little cramped when using the keypad. But for the E90, these problems are gone...

Tips & Tricks
For those who are interested, here are some tips for the application settings:


First of all, my recommendation to everyone is to set the game to full screen through Menu -> Graph -> Size. This is to ensure you use your screen to its maximum.



As you can see, there is much difference between the Origin and Full settings.

Next up we have Menu -> Graph -> Output. There are 2 settings here which are Direct and Bitmap. Direct has better speed but I have noticed that the screen gets pushed to the right just a little bit. You will know what I mean when you look at the left side of the screen (Sorry, it can't be shown in the screen shots). By choosing Bitmap, the problem with the screen is fixed but games run at a slower speed.

Last on the menu is Menu -> Graph -> Frameskip. This can help increase the speed of the games by incrementing the number of frames skipped. Through some testing, I found out that 2 is the best number for this setting as it gives good speed while allowing the game to run smoothly.

As for the other settings, they do not affect performance in any way. For me, I usually set the Sound Volume to 0 since the sound in most games can't be fully emulated, which means they sound quite bad.

I hope this helps those of you out there wanting to play games on your E90. If there are any questions, just post them in the comments section.

Reviewed Version - v1.12

*Update*
v1.20 - Vampent has just released a new version of vBagX which provides faster performance as well as better sound support.

v1.25 - Another update and this time, speed has improved even more. Vampent has added an option to adjust the compatibility mode of the application (range from 0 - 3), which allows previous games that didn't work, to be played by adjusting the compatibility. According to Vampent, compatibility mode 3 is slow but I didn't feel much difference on the E90. With sound turned on, the game gets slower though. Apart from that, there's media key support, but it doesn't apply for the E90 and finally a simple cheat file support that requires you to create your own cheat file.

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