This is my entry for the RetroChallenge of 2024. I know that the rules specified for a “retro” computer, and I think a Nokia Booklet 3G is worthy of the label, because it was released back in 2009, and that makes it 15 years old, even if the unit is still pretty usable in 2024. I’ve written as well about this little jewel and you can read more about it in my article.

Luckily I had a lot of devices to pick from, as I have a big collection of computers of all ages. So I decided that I will use one of the many booklets I have for a future project, and this was the perfect occasion.

A couple of months ago, I bought some 74th-hand computers (because they weren’t second hand anymore, judging by the state in which they were), because it contained a Nokia Booklet among some Acers and Packard Bells and other chinese-made-german-branded units, and the seller moronically said that the lid is white, which was not, of course. Make sure to ask for photos if you’re not going to collect the product yourself! If you read my post above, you saw that I have a blue one and several black ones, but the white acrylic top still eludes me to this day. Almost everything in the job lot was mostly junk, as the units had already most of their valuable things stripped off. I wanted to keep the Booklet, but its battery bulged a lot, had leaked and fused with the chassis, so it was a nice fire hazard. Luckily, the booklet opens on the other side, so I was able to salvage the HDD, the Wifi and 3G cards and also the display assembly, to use for any project.

So as a project for this year’s Retro Challenge, I decided to get said display assembly, to paint it orange, to match the theme of “Halloween” of this year and replace it on one of the functional Booklets I have. Some of them are in perfect working order, but some others are haunted by various problems, and I chose to pick one that had a borked and unactivated Windows installation, which is weird, as all the units came from a company that phased them out. I think someone tried to install a different Windows version on this than the bundled Windows 7 Starter, it even had WinRAR in Russian already installed, so that’s that.

Part One: Painting

People know that I try to be handy, although I’m not. I once tried to solder two wires to a pin each on a DIN-9 connector and I managed to solder zero wires and four pins one to the other. I’ve almost burned my house down while trying to make a sandwich. If “clumsy” was an RPG stat, I’d definitely put most of my level points in there. So I started by searching online “how to paint plastic”, even though the cover of the Booklet is acrylic.

So I started by properly sanding the surface, cleaning it, sanding it some more, cleaning it with isopropyl alcohol, degreasing it and then cleaning it some more. I applied the first coat which was pretty bad, then sanded and cleaned and applied a second coat which went actually worse, then sanded once more and went for a third, and then a fourth coat. I think I should have stopped earlier, but when I saw the result of the fourth coat, I just went like “fuck it, the colour is even, it’s covered all over and the pattern makes it look a bit more janky”. So I upped the jank factor to eleven, and just decided to just leave it as it is.

Some lessons I learned from this procedure is that using double-sided tape all around the screen to keep the paint from getting to the electronics was a good decision, but next time I try this, I need to use a tape that’s not this janky and leaves too much residue on the things where it sticks. Taping the wires on the other side of the cardboard using sticky tape was also a good idea to prevent getting paint stuck into the connectors or to rip the cables by mistake.

As a first attempt to paint something, I find it very janky, but still looks like a decent result. I was thinking about searching for some Halloween-themed stickers and small decorations, to make it more Halloween-ish., but I think I’ll just leave it simple, as I like a lot the colour.

Part Two: Mounting, testing, beauty shots

Changing the display on a Booklet is a fairly easy task, and I’ve done it before, so I didn’t expect any issues here, except for the fact that being as dumb as I usually am, I totally forgot to do something very important before the first step, and that was to test the display from the scavenged machine. Will it work? Does the backlight still work? Does it have any dead pixels? No one knows. Only this morning I realized how dumb I was, because I spent all that time and energy to paint a display which may not work.

So after removing the janky double-sided tape from the assembly (well, most of it), I added the screen protector back and then I took the receiving laptop, opened it up, removed the old display (maybe paint one green for St. Patrick’s day?) and added the new assembly in its place. I connected all the wires (remember to take photos before disassembling something so you know what goes back where), connected a charger and powered the computer up.

Oh the surprise! I had when the computer booted and things started to appear on the screen! It turns out the display is fine and the backlight works fine, there are no dead pixels, and even the Wi-fi seems to get reception, so the cables are all in the proper place. I didn’t test the 3G, because I don’t have a compatible SIM card, and I won’t use it in town anyway.

Put next to the other two colours I have, the laptop looks brilliant and I’m actually happy with the result! I mean, see for yourself!

Part Three: Software

I’m going to keep the current OS installed, as it looks as a janky install of Windows 7, where some drivers are not installed, especially the video one, however the media keys seem to work fine. The first step I’ll have to do is to activate Windows, by definitely using the serial key on the bottom and not the Activation Scripts one can find on github. I also used that tool to switch the installation from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional, and then activate it.

Once this was done, I’ve started to work on the jankiest possible Halloween theme to use, with a nice wallpaper and some nice contrasting colours, to remind both of Halloween and the 90s. I’ve seearched wallhaven.cc as always, and I found a few cute ones, as usual, filtering out Anime, AI Art and leaving only SFW results, because the amount of titties is too damn high, and I want a funny build, not porn. I finally went with this one because it’s colourful and puts in value the screen of the Booklet.

I’ve managed to “design” a full on janky black-and-orange theme that looks like crap and is mostly unusable. I love it! Windows gives some colours customizations, but as Win 7 was already starting to migrate various UI components to the Aero design, not everything can be customized, or one specific colour will be set in twenty places, but it’s fine. I would have loved a fully orange taskbar, but I can’t do that without changing the entire color scheme.

In terms of entertainment, we’re going to use VLC version 0.9.8a, because we don’t need too much advanced stuff, and we’re gonna watch some of the best Halloween-related titles: Addams Family Animated (1992), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969), The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (2003) and Tales from the Crypt (1989).

We can’t be talking about entertainment without talking about music, so I’m gonna put a folder that I used to have on a party DVD, and for playback, I’m going to use Winamp 2.9.5 with the HalloweenAMP skin. I found better looking skins, but this is so janky and confusing, it had to be this one.

I’ve also taken some time to make a new boot screen using the Windows 7 Boot Updater software (which I won’t link because it doesn’t work), but it somehow doesn’t apply it properly and it still shows the default blank one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. At least you can see a mockup of how it would look, it’s not something impressive, but it could have been a cool addition.

I could install some other programs and tools, but I’ll just leave it to these and start playing. But first, sheep.exe!

Part Four: Games

What’s the reason of making such a silly build if we’re not gonna play on it? So let’s go and test some more games than I did last time I wrote about the Nokia Booklet 3G.

• ❌ Quake 2 – Installed it, but it just won’t open. The quake2.exe process seems to be running, but it’s not doing too much. I’ll have to work on that a bit.
• ✅ Mortal Kombat 4 – Runs and plays super well, but I need to reconfigure the buttons.
• ✅ Worms Armageddon – Runs and plays just fine, I managed to win a quick game.
• ✅ Diablo 2 – Opens, but runs on a very low framerate (something like 15FPS). Running it in windowed mode (adding -w at the end of the path in the shortcut) make is way smoother.
• ✅ Warcraft III – Similar to D2, the framerate is very low, but could be tweaked to be better.
• ❌ Unreal Tournament – Throws an error and closes. Tried various video settings, but it still won’t open.
• ❌ Prepelix (a Romanian branded version of Moorhuhn) – Throws an error (DirectDraw Init FAILED) and closes.

For shits and giggles, I tried to play some of the games I’m usually running on my retro computers:

• ✅ Hoyle Board Games 2001 – Runs just fine.
• ✅ Kyodai Mahjong – Runs fairly smooth in 3D, an average of 25FPS.
• ✅ Midtown Madness 2 – Runs decent, has some frame drops, but still playable.
• ❌ Need for Speed III – loaded the menu fine, but crashed at the end of the race loading screen, NFS Porsche crashes when launching.
• ✅ Half-Life/Counter-Strike – Works really well in 640x480 software mode. Open GL works decent too, but screenshots turned out completely black.
• ❌ FIFA 2000 – The game opens but after loading a match, it crashes.

Re-installing/upgrading DirectX – The installer is “initializing…” for about 10 minutes and then it threw an error that it can’t download a specific file. That’s what you get with these crap internet installers. I managed to find a redistributable DirectX installer that worked, but it didn’t seem to improve too much on the experience above, so that’s not it. I could wipe the system completely and reinstall the OS, but I’d rather focus on what works on this haunted installation.

Part Four: Conclusion

It was nice to work on this project, and even if it’s not “ancient”, this still counts as retro in my book. The main problem with the Booklet will always and forever remain its RAM, which is soldered and limited to 1GB. This will always put a very hard limit on its performance and usability, especially if trying to browse the “modern” internet. Otherwise, it’s a nice toy, can be useful for various tasks like RSS reading, browsing some retro websites, chat on IRC and use email. It can also be used for coding and building stuff, so even if it’s retro, it’s not yet obsolete. A lovely machine that, despite its small issues, manages to live proudly in 2024. It definitely is a tinkering project and you have a lot of tweaks that you need to do to it to make it usable, but the Nokia Booklet 3G can work nicely as a retro station even today. As for me, if VLC, Winamp, a browser and IRC run fine, then it’s all good.

Part Five: Another swing

Since Eric suggested to make some updates on this article as I fiddle with the Booklet for the month, I made a battle plan for the month which started with replacing the HDD of the booklet with an SSD, because I was 140% positive I had another two Micro SATA SanDisk SSDs in my box of things, but apparently the only ones I have are some ZIFs I wanted to use on some iPods.

As you can see, I hit the small roadblock of my upgrade, but I was lucky enough to find some fresh hard drives from some older Booklets, so I guess it’s time to go exploring! Luckily, I bought a while ago a Micro SATA to USB adapter, so I can browse the content of those drives.

Ordered from left to right, the first hard drive had what I’ll call “the corporate version”, it’s a Windows 7 Starter installation with some corporate videos from the company where the laptops were taken from. The second drive has what looks like a Windows 7 Professional install, and I remember I used this on a very cursed build where no drivers would install under any circumstances. The third seems borked, as it has a partition that neither MacOS nor Windows would recognize, so I assume it’s a failed Windows installation, because of the “System Reserved” partition that’s next to it. The good part is that the first two drives still have the original Recovery partition with stuff from Nokia, which are very useful if we ever want to return this to factory conditions.

Upon booting again the Booklet, I see that the wallpaper is gone and the “This copy of Windows is not genuine” nag message reappeared, so this can mean only one thing: 🪓. Let’s do a fresh windows install, as the current install is not very stable and stuff seems to be borked. So I installed Windows 7 Professional along with the default drivers, to have a stock Win7 setup which I can bork myself. However, it didn’t take long to achieve said performance, as gaming on Windows 7 on this computer feels like owning a motorcycle, where you keep it 11 months in the garage fiddling with various tubes and screws and spark plugs and innards to be able to enjoy it for 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon when it’s not raining. Straight out of the box, the alternate driver threw errors when installing, with Diablo 2 not even running, throwing the error that DirectDraw cannot be initialized. I tried reinstalling DirectX in hope than it would fix any of the problems, but I guess gaming on the Booklet requires a bit of witchcraft, because not even a command prompt would run in full-screen mode.

After reinstalling DirectX, I rebooted and tried a few of the games I previously tried, and the performance was pretty bad. I like this laptop for how well and smart it’s designed, but for many times I feel that Nokia did some really bad decisions when engineering this, and from a software point of view, it seems really really cursed and requires you to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work. The next step will be to nuke everything once more, and try from scratch with the standard recovery partition, and to speed things up, I think I’m just going to replace the hard drive with one of the spares.

More updates soon.

Part Six: One last try

So I’ve tried the Windows 7 Pro another spin, a new fresh install, and hit the same issues as before. So, as I planned before, I took the hard drive out and replaced it with one of the “corporate” ones. The system is running Windows 7 Starter and Starcraft still throws the same error, Quake loads the same without loading anything really, so I think I’ve either got a laptop with a cursed video card, or there’s something wrong with the install. On the other hand, it’s still a decent video card, but with limited support, so there’s not much I’m going to do about this. While I was getting ready to wrap things up for the day, I noticed I was still running BIOS 1.50, so I flashed version 2.00, to see if it improves anything. It didn’t. So now I’m downloading Debian, and will try it tomorrow.

Part Seven: Pangling

Got a live CD image of Devuan Daedalus, because it’s the last one that supports 32-bit, and flashed it to an USB stick

1. sudo diskutil list
2. sudo diskutil unmountdisk /dev/diskX, where diskX is the identifier of the stick (in my case disk4)
3. sudo dd if=./devuan_daedalus_5.0.0_i386_desktop-live.iso of=/dev/disk4 bs=1m to write the image to the stick

Then booted and played a bit with the live CD. It’s nice that it comes with Firefox ESR and I was able to surf the net for a bit and play with the OS, but I somehow didn’t love it. I mean it’s a strong and sturdy operating system, but it feels a tad too serious and productive-y, and I don’t feel like it’s going to help too much in the long run, or in the main purpose of this project altogether, and that would be to have fun. It reminded me of the time I was using Ubuntu, back in 2007 and when I didn’t play any games, needed to run an older version of Photoshop in Wine, because GIMP was not as developed, and my computer usage was limited to listening to music, watching some TV series, chatting on IRC and browsing the web. So I guess it’s back to gaming on Windows for the last part of the month.

Part Eight: Hold my beer and watch this!

Halloween is almost around the corner and I’m super annoyed that I wasn’t able to fine one single Halloween decoration or sticker on a set that would work properly with the Booklet’s cover, so I decided to just let it as it is. I could try to print and cut myself some, but eh. In terms of activity, I kept the Booklet on my desk at all times powered on and running something on the background, either a Scooby-Doo marathon or a Cartoon Network 1995 block, so Eric wouldn’t say that I wasn’t retro enough :D

And at some point, something struck me. This is nice, but I should go the totally cursed way and try to install MacOS on it!!! It has been done before, as shown by Christian Payne, so I put my ass to work.

To create an installing media, I took the ISO for Snow Leopard retail from Archive.org, which may or may not work nowadays. If archive.org is down, try getting the torrent file from here

I then popped an USB stick into my Mac Mini and ran the following commands to see which is the identifier of my USB stick (in my case it was disk3) and then copy the ISO to the stick using dd, using the method in Part Seven, but using the already downloaded ISO Mac_OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard_Retail.iso as the source.

I then proceeded to follow the steps described in the Creating the Snow Leopard Installation section in the above guide, using my old 2006 White MacBook. I chose a 64GB USB3.0 drive and that might have been a bad decision, as it seems that the installation takes AGES. At least, I’m listening to a great record on vinyl that makes the time pass easier. Moreover, because I was so eager to start this, I didn’t read, nor check all the steps of the process, I was stuck to the step where I needed to install some KEXT files, but the archive with them, vaiop20091014us.tar.bz2 was a pain in the ass to locate. I did eventually find it, and then I hit another hurdle, because the other files, like MacOSXUpd10.6.1.dmg 10.6.1 combo installer, SuperDuper backup program, and Chameleon 2 RC3 were also a pain in the ass to find, BECAUSE PEOPLE KEEP USING SHIT HOSTING SERVICES FOR FUCKING IMPORTANT DATA!!! Only thing that was easy to find was KextHelper

I will keep a copy of them on my server, just in case I want to do another Hackintosh soon.

Downloads

The MacOSX installation seems to take a lot, after an hour it slowed to a crawl with 12 minutes remaining. I’m seeing the progress bar filling up, but it only filled by 70 pixels in the last hour (look in the last photo at the distance from the cursor to where the bar has filled), so I’ll let it crunch until the morning. If it doesn’t succeed, I’ll try installing to an usb HDD (maybe try to install on a Booklet Toshiba HDD straight away?).

01:29-04:22 AM update

The installation is complete and I’m looking at a very slow Mac OSX running from the USB stick, but it works. Time to continue the steps and install the bootloader and the Kernel extensions as explained in the tutorial from above. After all was done (very slowly because of the USB stick’s speed), I moved the USB stick to the Nokia Booklet, booted it AND IT RUNS! Now it’s time to make the USB clone to the internal Hard Disk, which come to think about it, could have been solved if I installed the OS directly on a Toshiba 1.8" HDD that I would have then installed in the computer. But it’s late and tiredness plus screwdrivers are not a good combination.

10:03 AM update

Just woke up and the SuperDuper! finished copying everything to the internal hard drive, so it’s time to reboot and rebuild the kext cache. While this is rebuilding, this has been a been a nice experience, throwing me a bit back to the day when I was younger and poorer and technology was really badly documented, when I tried to install MacOS on the computer I had back then (Intel Pentium D 820, the first processor to have dual core!) and the issues I had back then, including torrenting a bootable shock photo. This is not the case anymore because despite the hurdles and issues I had while doing this, I finally have a (partially) working Nokia Booklet 3G running Mac OSX 10.6.1!! Unfortunately, when I said “partially”, the only issue with this is that Audio doesn’t work, so no music and no movies, unless I start doing a Buster Keaton marathon. I did fire up iTunes and copied some music to it and I’ll use it to sync some bangers to one of my iPods, and because it’s Halloween, I chose the 20 GB black and red U2 Edition iPod from 2004 (to satisfy Eric’s complaint about the Booklet not being 20 years old :P). Now I’m going to install Adium for IRC, then go deep down the rabbit hole and see where it ends. I might post an update on it every now and then.

Part Nine: Conlcusion

This challenge was really nice because it took me out of my comfort zone, and since I planned doing an orange Nokia Booklet, I thought it to be a very good idea, despite the hardware not being retro enough for some. It took me in a nice trip around three different operating systems, three experiences that reminded me of the computer usage of yesteryear. Packed with both nostalgia and adventure, I declare the Pumpkin Spiced Nokia Booklet 3G to be a success, even if nothing turned out exactly as I wanted in the beginning. I sanded, degreased, painted, played, watched, listened, ran as Administrator, formatted, recovered, reinstalled, configured, copied, sudo-ed, chatted and iTuned on this small marvel with buttons and I’m happy that I took part in this challenge! I took this small laptop on a nice trip of its peak days and I also got to use some other old hardware in the process, so I’m going to mark this as a win, regardless of what others will think.

See you next year!

Part Ten: Closing Thoughts

Sometimes life happens, or work happens, or social interactions happen and I didn’t manage to use the Pumpkin Spiced Booklet too much in the last few days, except for Scooby Doo reruns (fuck Scrappy Doo, btw!). While chilling today, I discovered a neat video made by Bringus Studios, where he tried to game on a Trimble Yuma. While the thing is so different from the Nokia Booklet 3G in so many ways, its internal are not so different, the same 1.6 Intel Atom CPU, the Intel GMA500 graphics card and also 1GB of soldered RAM, As you can see in his video, there’s not much gaming performance into this little box unless you’re going to jump a lot of hoops. I’ll re-state my previous statement that while this is a brilliant internet and multimedia machine, it will suck trying to game on it. Sure, you might, but your options are so limited and the amount of fiddling required is so big, you’re better just with using a slightly better computer.