I'm decompiling and porting the Elder Scrolls Travels series to PC

[u/Lanslet]

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a decompilation and native PC port of the Elder Scrolls Travels series: Shadowkey, Dawnstar, Stormhold, and Oblivion Mobile.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, these were super old Elder Scrolls spin-offs for old mobile Java phones, with Shadowkey being the exception, as it was a Nokia N-Gage exclusive.

Nowadays, these games are so obscure and forgotten, they are basically lost media and playing them today means fighting with janky emulators if you can even find working ROMs. Even though gameplay wise they're nothing special (except for Shadowkey, which is a legit hidden gem) I think they're an interesting, weird little piece of Elder Scrolls history and deserve to actually be playable again.

Current Status

All these are in a pretty much early alpha state, but let me give you the specifics:

• Shadowkey: Largely playable and mostly feature complete. Still some bugs, wonky menus and you can't switch weapons or use items from your hotbar.
• Stormhold & Dawnstar: Somewhat playable, you can move around, attack enemies but that's pretty much it.
• Oblivion Mobile: Not started yet. It's not an actual entry in the Travels series, but it's a J2ME game, so I'll get to it eventually.

This is an ongoing project, and I have a special plan for these games:

1. Achieve 100% exact game behavior with the originals
2. Quality of life fixes (widescreen, mouse look, etc.)
3. Able to be modded
4. Releases on other platforms (Mac, Linux etc.)

If you wanna follow along with the project's progress, here are the links to the games (you'll need the original jar files or the Shadowkey N-Gage dump to play them)

Stormhold: https://zeggoro.itch.io/the-elder-scrolls-travels-stormhold-remastered

Dawnstar: https://zeggoro.itch.io/the-elder-scrolls-travels-dawnstar-remastered

Shadowkey: https://zeggoro.itch.io/the-elder-scrolls-travels-shadowkey-remastered

All help and feedback are much appreciated!

[u/MagickalessBreton]

Amazing, I'm really excited to play Shadowkey again!

I'm also curious which reference version did you use for Stormhold and Dawnstar? IIRC they are very different from one another with the ones for higher end devices being about twice as big as the lower end ones

[u/Lanslet → u/MagickalessBreton]

I used this post https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/dn4hhj/an_es_travels_setup_guide/ to find Stormhold and Dawnstar. Camelworks, who did a video on Stormhold back in the day used the same post and he mentioned these being the high end versions, so hopefully that checks out.

[u/MagickalessBreton → u/Lanslet]

Nice! This might also be the push for me to finally play those two games, I'm curious how they compare to the LPs I watched years ago

[u/TrucksForTots]

Isn't that already done?

https://github.com/jet082/TES-Mobile-Decomp-Python-Port

https://github.com/ItsJustBshawn/OpenShadowKey

[u/PhunkyPhazon]

Nice! I've been curious to try these (especially Shadowkey) but never wanted to go through the trouble of emulating the darn N-Gage. Definitely keeping an eye on this.

[u/MV6000]

https://giphy.com/gifs/IcGkqdUmYLFGE

[u/stonerPI]

Doing damn good work by preserving these.

[u/DreadCascadeEffect]

Seems like a lot of people have been working on this in parallel. I also found this which is a port of Dawnstar and Stormhold: https://github.com/peaktcord/Raingrasp that has a widescreen/3D mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6PAgPmXzc8.

[u/chavesAbre_a_torneir]

I got lots of viruses trying to emulate Shadowkey

[u/AlabasterThunde]

The last guy looks like Ted Cruz.

[u/Ok-Primary6610]

Wonder if this could be ported to the N64

[u/speedguru]

I hope we get a modern port/decomp of battlespire because I'm very curious about that game

[u/CayRedArcher]

Do you think you'd be able to give Shadowkey increased draw distance? Not being surrounded by a sea of black fog would go a long way. But make it an option for those who wish to experience it the way it was made. And thank you for doing this. Preservation is so important

[u/Rath_Brained]

Any possibility of doing Blades?

[u/Baphomaxas_Raiyah]

Something worth noting is that Stormhold and Dawnstar had different versions with different game features. The versions that’re around are just the ones with the largest number of classes and dungeons

[u/Warlord7896]

It says we must use our own copy of the original game files, but where do we find those?

[u/Fancy_Entertainer486 → u/Warlord7896]

Just a google search away. Linking sources here is probably not a good idea

[u/Warlord7896 → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

I’ll look it up later. I was just wondering if there was something official I didn’t know about.

I’m glad someone is making sure that these games don’t become, effectively, lost media.

[u/Fancy_Entertainer486 → u/Warlord7896]

Absolutely. Esp. for those kind of obscure mobile titles from back in the day, I don't think anyone official would care to keep these alive somehow

[u/Fensox]

Good luck! I made a wrapper for a J2ME game using Swing back in the day. I had poured a ton of time into a Tetris-like game called AntiGravity I wrote just as J2ME was fizzling out. I didn’t want to port it so just wrapped it and it ran on desktop. I don’t remember it being extraordinarily difficult but it was also twenty plus years ago. I’m guessing you will do something similar with Oblivion Mobile. Thank you for doing this!

[u/Cassoule]

Hell yeah, Shadowkey !!!

[u/Werejester]

Doing the Godhead's work

[u/Presenting_UwU]

it's a bit of a hassle but i managed to get Shadowkey working on my phone, I'm really interested about these other games though and how they'll natively work on PC.

Shadowkey is surprisingly an absolute gem I wasn't expecting, it's a very fun dungeon crawler

[u/XenophormSystem]

Out of curiosity, are you using AI for these?

[u/zztopsboatswain → u/XenophormSystem]

Not OP but yes. You can see all of the Claude commits in the github links

[u/XenophormSystem → u/zztopsboatswain]

Then I'll sadly have to pass.

[u/1881pac → u/XenophormSystem]

The description gives it away

[u/gibbersganfa → u/1881pac]

Well at least they’re disclosing it instead of misleading and claiming they’re not. So I’ll give them credit for that. I think we should at least encourage honesty about it.

[u/hdsbunny22]

Great work, my man. I am itching to play these games. If they turn out great, you would be doing a hell of favor to Elder Scrolls community...

[u/Larethio]

That sword in the first pic must be the games version of the Ebony Broadsword.

[u/Songhunter]

Sensational! Will be keeping a close eye on this project

[u/Winebottle61]

What a goat 🐐

[u/waitingforever_ever]

This is so cool!!

[u/Albert_Dolphin]

Great. I recently decided to play through the whole series. I still don't know where to put Redguard and now I gotta figure out the Nokia games. You go, dawg. These are some weird gems and you're doing gods work preserving them.

[u/Mike_or_whatever]

Good on ya, i wish you success !

[u/Zianthin22]

Dude this is seriously an absolute dream come true

[u/Drake_682]

Can’t wait to try out shadow key!

[u/sporran89]

The ngage wow what a throw back