We all have emulators, and thousands of games. Most games are not worth playing even once, and are better off dead. But there are some games worth playing. Some of them are old and can be emulated. What are they?

Four out of five stars is, in my opinion, the minimum to make the list. Since we could fill the rest of our lives with only four to five star entertainment I see no reason to lower the bar. They don't have to be run-able on the tablet, just easily emulated.

I think there are hundreds of great games out of the thousands of roms, but see your point.

Still, I would be happy with the same emulators on Android. The emulators on that device and have better compatability rates than any other platform for phones. If Droid had a better KB or d-pad it would be an instant defacto old school game system.

Non console games or emus I would like to see ported to N900

Duke Nukem'
Quake 2
MDK
MAME
Raiden 2
Unreal Tounament
Amiga 500

I would like Pac-Man.

Me too - I'd like Arkanoid as well. The complex games are just too demanding for me on a smaller screen.

It shouldn't be too hard to port some clone of Pac-Man to Maemo. At least there's Kapman for KDE Desktop written in Qt. It would be cool to modify it to use accelerometer as the game control so you'd control it by turning the device.

Sadly I don't currently have time to do this But if someone starts a project on this, I'll be happy to join and help as much as I can.

I did a search for "best games ever" a while ago to see what might be worth working on. After going through a page where someone had painstakingly compiled dozens of published top 10 lists and then produced a meta top 10 list, I concluded that emulators and (legally obtained, of course!) ROMs should be able to cover most of what was worthwhile in past games. It saddened me a little because i've never been much of a console gamer. Anything good on computers that didn't become obsolete for whatever reason went to consoles, and the big console franchises (Zelda and Mario mostly) were runaway successes that generally never came to computers.

Of the classics that started life as computer games, most are either older and could be run on an emulator and/or have open source versions, or are closed and not really practical to bring to N900, but with some similar competitors that can be.

Examples of the first case are Civ ("Freeciv" is available for OS2008 and the maintainer is an active participant on Maemo.org), Starcontrol (i've got uqm in extras-devel and just contributed an upstream patch to make it behave nicely in the background so it can be moved to testing soon) and all the classic adventure games and like the Sierra classics that run on the SCUMMVM. I was looking at Archon (coincidentally another game by the same guys that brought us Starcon a few years later), but apparently it has been recently been licensed and a commercial version released for iPhone, so that's probably going to come if Maemo catches on. Many, many more games can be played through a Commodore emulator or Dosbox.

Of the latter type, Starcraft and UT are not open, but similar games like Quake III and Widelands have already been ported or are in the process. I'm not sure if that leaves anything out that could reasonably be brought to Maemo.

What does that leave us with?

Personally on a phone, I like simple pickup-play-setdown games that you can easily pause and resume (possibly with a minute/hour break in between). That said, here are my suggestions.

Tetris
Frozen Bubble
Non time based Puzzle Games (ex. Sudoku, Mah Jong, Card Games, etc)
Turn Based Games

Well don't forget Flandry that the computer version of the game is going to be more mouse friendly. Kind of sucks to play a game on the SNES emulator that has a pointer, but you have to use the directional pad.

...so to summarize: Amgia 500 emulator please.
UAE already has an Arm port, which debian.org builds. UAE can sometimes take some serious CPU time though, so I'm not sure how well it really work.

(of course, dosbox is pretty cool as well, though often dos games didn't have a mouse either).

Give me some specific game titles regardless of whether they'll work on maemo. I want someone to type "Great old games" into google, wind up here and go "wow google really works."

That's why I posted in off topic.

There was this game which was generally physical (i.e. was on object, not a software). There was a ball you had to take to a goal through a maze by tilting the thing. Played a version in iphone that used the accelerometer and it was awesome
I don't know the name though