OpenTTD on a Samsung Galaxy Tab with a Bluetooth Mouse

You may know that I love Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD). It´s on my favourite games list and I also wrote a short article about it when version 1.0 was released. Recently I discovered that a guy name pelya did an Android port of the game using the SDL libary. And since I´m a more or less proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a while I decided to give it a try. Right after starting the game one very big problem occured. The controls (and the user interface) hadn´t been redesigned to be used with a touch device (with probably a much smaller screen than a pc has) so the game was pretty unplayable. I was a bit sad about that so I headed over to good old friend Google.

I found a nice solution for the problem by getting my hands on a Logitech Bluetooth Traveler Mouse and connected it to my Galaxy Tab. Android is so flexible that this worked by only 3 finger touches (haaa…on a touch device you can´t say clicks, can you ?) and here´s the video result for you. There´s still some work to do to make the game really well playable. For example right now you can´t access more than a 1-layer menu because Android can´t differ between a mouse click and a mouse click and hold. Pelya – the guy who did the Android port – optimized the SDL configuration already after I gave him a lead but right now SDL doesn´t seem to be capable of doing that kind of mouse emulation. But I think the OpenTTD community will soon have a version ready that will be optimized for mobile devices in any way.

In the meantime you can enjoy the video !