How to play Dungeon Defenders on a Droid or Milestone

[Varking]

This comes to you via Progor on the official forums for Dungeon Defenders which can be found here: Dungeon Defenders Forum

And the original thread he created can be found here: How to play on a Motorola Droid or Droid Milestone.

Progor writes:

Want to play Dungeon Defenders, but have the Motorola Droid or Milestone? Well, it's not officially supported due to only having 256 MB of RAM. However, it does have the GPU to support the Unreal graphics, so if we can work around the memory limitations, we can get it to work. Luckily, the game itself only requires 256 MB of RAM, it just needs that much left over after the OS and any other running services take their portion, so it can work! This procedure may also work on other phones that only have 256 MB of RAM, but have the graphics muscle to handle it. It won't help phones with ARM11 processors like the G1, Hero, and such, though. As far as I know, the Motorola Droid is the most popular android phone right now, so this should help a lot of people.

Here's what you have to do. First, root your phone. I recommend following this guide for the Droid:

Root Droid 1 - regardless of OS version - Droid Forum - Verizon Droid & the Motorola Droid Forum

I don't have a Milestone, but even with its locked bootloader, it has been rooted. Try following this guide if you have the Milestone:

How to Root Motorola Milestone on Android 2.1 ? My Digital Life

Once you do that, the rest of the instructions should be just the same for both phones.

Then you'll need a rom with a kernel that supports swap space. I recommend Ultimate Droid 2.5, but any custom rom should do. Download it from:

The Ultimate Droid - Forums -> Download Manager -> Motorola Droid -> The Ultimate Droid 2.5.0

Then, get "Rom Manager" from the market. The free one is fine. (There are other ways to install custom roms, but this is among the simpler ones). You'll need to flash the Clockwork Recovery (the first option in the program - allow it super user privileges when it asks), then choose install from SD card, navigate to your downloads folder, or wherever you put the rom you just downloaded, and select it. It will reboot your phone, act like it's doing an OTA update, and when it reboots you'll have a custom rom.

Then, you'll want to overclock to get the speed to handle the game. Ultimate droid provides an easy way to do this. From the home screen, press the menu button, then settings, UltimateDroid Settings, Built-In Overclocking. Make sure Enable CPU frequency scaling is checked, Check that the scaling governor is set to ondemand, set your minimum overclocking speed to 250 (any lower and it will not wake up for phone calls well), and set your maximum overclocking speed to 800.

Then, download an app from the Market called Swapper 2. For anyone interested in the technical details, this creates a file on your SD card to use as swap space, and enables swap usage in the kernel. Launch Swapper 2, go to menu, busybox, and Download it. Then, go to menu, settings, and set the swap size to 128 MB (DunDef is choppy at 64 MB, but works pretty well at 128 MB - you may need to experiment with higher values if you have lots of services running). Also, set the swappiness to at least 20. You may want to experiment with even higher values to try to improve system responsiveness i.e. if the phone rings in the middle of a game. Finally, exit the menu and click the On button at the top. There may be a few errors, but give it a minute or two. It takes a little while to allocate that large of a file on an SD card. You may have to turn swap off and back on a few times to get it to work, but make sure you have 256MB free on your SD card if you have problems, and be sure to give it at least 5 minutes if it looks like it's not doing anything. Note that this app greatly increases SD card usage (particularly writes), so it will shorten its lifespan. Also, it may actually degrade system performance to leave this on all the time. If you plan to do that, consider getting a Class 6 micro SD card to replace the cheap one that came with the phone. Its higher speed will make it better suited for swap space. If all you care about is running DunDef though, turn on Swapper 2 before a play session, and off after you finish, and any card should work. Just don't expect to actually be able to answer a phone call in the middle of a game.

Now, finally, you should be able to run Dungeon Defenders. It does take longer to load this way - it has to move all the operating system and any other running apps to swap during the loading process to free up space for the game, but at least it gives us a way to run it. I am able to run the game at full resolution with little to no graphics lag. One thing I noticed is that if I get a phone call during a session, I had to reboot the phone to get the game to load back correctly. This may not be the case with a larger swap file. And I was not able to answer the phone in time to actually get my phone call, either. Maybe higher class SD might resolve that issue.

Either way, for those of us who have the original Motorola Droid/Milestone and are either not up for an upgrade yet or are waiting for Tegra 2 phones to show up (like the Motorola Etna), then this represents the only way to get Dungeon Defenders going on this phone. My Droid has yet to fail me, and for a phone that was released before the Snapdragon/Hummingbird line of processors became available, it has proved to be a very resilient and powerful machine. Dungeon Defenders does, however, represent pretty much the top end of the phone's capabilities. I'm just happy to see my phone can run a game that was originally slated to only be able to run on Tegra GPUs.

Post if you have any issues, and I'll answer any questions I can.

Thanks goes out to him but I really just wanted to help spread the word to us original Droid users who wanted to play this awesome game but unfortunately couldn't upgrade or wanted to wait for one. Thanks to him again!