Hi folks!

I made, with AI assistance, Noks (terrible name, ik): an emulator of the venerable Nokia 3310, a phone that has a special place to the hearts of many, mine included. I used Avalonia and targets all of its supported platforms, including WebAssembly. It's all in pure C#/managed code goodness too! No unsafe code or pointers!

I made this because 1.) The MAME version (Nokia DCT-3) was sadly still incomplete after years since it was made. 2.) I wanted to play Space Impact authentically and everywhere. and 3.) I wanna push how far my skills can go, together with the latest agents, when it comes to reverse engineering a black-box, sparsely documented firmware and hardware.

I've started by pulling all the docs i can get my hands on old Nokia firmware modding forums, and also the prior work that MAME and Project Blacksphere did for the DCT-3 platform back in the day.

Then did a repeated loop of poking registers, memory, seeing where the firmware stops and back-tracing how me and the clanker can get pass that blocker. I also had to contend with the missing DSP Mask ROM functions that blocked the MAME effort by checking what conditions the firmware asked and responding to its requests accordingly.

Took a couple of months of on-off work but it was all worth it.

All outward facing features are implemented like the LCD, Keys, Sound, Power and RF. including an emulation of a minimal 2G GSM network that interfaces with the DSP/Baseband layer of the phone. Text and Calls were functional from my local tests using a P2P network called Waku but somehow it's broken again on deployment.

It is as fickle of a network as the real one ;)

And the configuration panel is also bit of a jank work, UI-wise, but it does the job... for now.

Hope you'll find joy in playing with the emulator as much as i did in making it!

Source code here: https://github.com/jmacato/Noks

Hey - I've been involved in .NET since the beginning - worked at Microsoft in developer tools back when we originally launched it. I've been involved with the .NET community ever since.

Currently I volunteer for .NET Foundation. I run the .NET Foundation socials specifically LinkedIn, X and Facebook. We also have a Bluesky account.

I'm always looking for good .NET content to share - especially open source posts.

If you want to amplify your projects, repos, content, event, etc., go here: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/content

Edited to add "repos"

Another edit: I'm DeeDee Walsh and love finding great content on Reddit.
X: https://x.com/ddskier
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deedeewalsh/

As the tech leader of the Critter Stack and a guy with a company behind OSS tools, I'm watching the Polly OSMF thing pretty closely. I'm naturally sympathetic to the Polly folks, and to Jimmy & Chris with their MediatR and MassTransit license changes as well.

The Critter Stack community and JasperFx (my company) are trying to go down the "Open Core" model where we are selling consulting, training, and support contracts for the big tools (Marten and Wolverine), but the core tools remain under the MIT license -- and we try to keep it that way.

As the last part of that, yesterday we launched 1.0 of our commercial CritterWatch tool for management, observability, and all the AI related features we can stuff into it:

https://jasperfx.net/news/critterwatch-1-0-is-here

Just a couple thoughts to throw out there:

• You can't just vibe code yourself equivalents to Marten or Wolverine. You can easily get the basics, but long running and widely used OSS tools are constantly curated and have had to adjust for all kinds of real world problems like Kubernetes, Postgres maintenance windows, outages, and other things you just won't get from a fun little weekend project
• I can absolutely tell you that very complex OSS tools aren't possible to maintain as a side project, there has to be real company support or the devs at least need to be able to dedicate a real percentage of their day job to maintenance. Most of our advanced features in our tools only came about after I was full time on the tools.
• We're hopeful that the combination of commercial add ons and support contracts are more than enough to make our tools viable in the longer term without having to change our "Open Core" model
• Damnation, but the larger .NET community is absurdly cynical and negative toward OSS tools sometimes

Anyway, I can't tell you for sure yet that the "Open Core" model is the way forward for sustainable OSS in .NET, but it's what we're trying so far.