3D News

Recreating Blender to run on a Nokia N95

Bart ·

As part of a project to create a game engine on retro hardware, Dante Leoncini from Argentina is writing his own Blender version to run on a Nokia N95 – a phone from 2007!

Dante writes:

The project’s goal is to highlight the planned obsolescence of phones, both those from 18 years ago and current models. I aim to generate consumer demand for more sustainable and durable phones, reducing the vast amount of electronic waste. This would also help more people access technology through the recycling of these old devices.

The project is currently called Blendersito (this will be changed later), and it’s created entirely from scratch. There is no shared codebase with Blender as Dante tries to avoid the license restrictions of the GPL. However, in his recent video he explains he’d like this to become part of the main Blender project so he can take implement support for the .blend file format and other features.

This video from about a year ago gives a good overview of the project:

Don’t expect too much yet – Blendersito does less of 1% of what Blender can do. That said, it already handles PlayStation 4 models, supports effects like cell-shading and basic modeling.

Seeing some of these videos I can’t help but be impressed by the performance of such a simple and old phone. I also really enjoyed seeing how you can hook up a screen, keyboard and mouse to it.

You can follow the project along on its Github page.

This recent video gives an update on the project and the attention it’s been receiving lately:

Here are some videos of the

 

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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