Hello everybody, Thanks to this community I've discovered about the Sonic Cafe service and about games such as Nakayoshi Chao! or Shadow Shoot. Is it possible to play them on a PC or smartphone nowadays? Also, I still have my old phone with Sonic Unleashed mobile on it, but same question applies, is it possible to play it on other devices? Thank you, SojoboUchiwa
J2ME Loader will probably run the games if you can actually find them out there https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.playsoftware.j2meloader&hl=en_US
Japanese mobile games used a unique kind of java script called DoJa (stands for Docomo Java) so they are not going to work on J2ME emulators like KEmulator or J2ME Loader. from what i was able to gather not only its not possible to fully emulate these games right now. but pretty much 99% of all mobile DoJa games are lost media.
I have something to contribute to this. I have had experience hunting down DoCoMo games. I will share with you what I have learned from searching for the Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII game. In this search I have obtained Sonic 1 and 2 DOJA. But haven’t been able to back it up yet. To start off I believe Sonic Cafe is still in service for now. I-mode will shutdown in 2026. According to this person who has uploaded a video on YouTube of the gameplay it seems they are still in service. here are YouTube video game plays of games from Sonic Cafe. So how did he record footage like this? This person uses a SH-01C. SH stands for Sharp and Sharp phones are known for having this function to display i-appli (name of the files) on tv. By doing this, connecting to your computer and recording software you are able to do this. Demo and Full games Demos: these games are preinstalled on Docomo phones from what I have seen. I have a P902i that has Sonic 1 and a P902iS with Sonic 2 preinstalled. so far I have gotten the sonic games I wanted. But missing the maps I need. And a warning I need to issue to those out there is that just because the manual says they are preinstalled doesn’t guarantee that it will be installed on the phone you buy if you buy it. The Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII search has had experiences with this where the demos have been deleted. And the same thing can happen with the Sonic games. Because they fear that you will steal their personal data. Full games? Full versions of the games do exist but you will most likely not be able to play it. To prevent piracy Docomo has a special feature that when you download a game such as Sonic 2 the phone will patch the SIM card data to the game. Doing this means that if you don’t have the SIM card, you can’t play purchased content. But they do exist. Therefore, the SIM card is the proof of purchase. No SIM card that purchased game = no way of playing game on the phone. Where do I buy the phone? Buyee is where you go. This gives those outside of Japan the ability to purchase stuff from Yahoo auctions and Mercari. The phones are cheap and much better then eBay. These phones contain Lithium batteries. Make sure you check with Buyee if your area has any problems or not with this. Just to be safe. https://buyee.jp I got the phone with the Sonic game, can we back it up? In theory of course. But seeing as how in Japan it is heavily frowned upon to hack these phones and no overseas marketing has ever been done like any game systems have had none exist. It’s not impossible, it’s just going to need help, and a lot of it. No software extraction method exists. Hardware hack, reverse engineering is the only way for now. You are starting to head into Japan made technology that Japan won’t give data sheets to. This makes it more difficult. But in the right hands it can be done. I am currently looking into making this possible. If we did have the file, how would we play it? A working emulator does exist from DoCoMo. I went through the trouble of archiving as much SDK for the emulators as possible. There is DoJa and Star. DoJa has very low limitations, but the higher you go which is Star, the less limitations it can have. Different DoJa versions of the Sonic games exist. How many exists? We don’t know. This is because we don’t have a full compatibility list as of now. Some altering of the data may need to be done in order to play it. To this day nobody has ever extracted a purchased i-appli from a phone yet. Here is a link to DOJA/Star emulator and it’s SDK. This does work, I have been successful in making my own i-appli but can’t download it to my phone cause 3G activation doesn’t exist in my area. https://archive.org/details/i-appli-tools-updated Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 known compatible phones and details Info for this port of the game is small. Because not much info is available online. Sonic The Hedgehog 1 compatible with 504/505/700/FOMA/900/901/902/903 Sonic the hedgehog 2 compatible with P902iS Sonic The Hedgehog 1 This Demo is just the first half of the game. Contains 3 Maps, Green Hill Zone, Marble Zone and Spring Yard Zone. Can select any stage that is installed on the phone. The remaining maps is a separate application depending on some phones. P902i: pre installed (demo) (pg 312) Source: https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/binary/pdf/support/manual/P902i_J_All.pdf P701iD: pre installed (demo) pg328 Source: https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/binary/pdf/support/manual/P701iD_J_All.pdf P901iTV: pre installed (demo) pg305 Source https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english...ble/manual/download/p901itv/P901iTV_E_All.pdf Sonic the hedgehog 2 P902iS pre installed (demo) pg302 Source: https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/binary/pdf/support/manual/p902is/P902iS_J_All.pdf The game has Difficulty settings the following are available :EASY, MEDIUM and HARD Some noticeable differences from the Sonic 1 game installed on Docomo phone. Their is a noticeable difference between the game that is installed on the P901iTV and the P902i. This would be Stage select. Stage select is available for all Sonic games however the preinstalled game on the P901iTV only offers the first 3 stages of Sonic. The P902i has an option to select the all of the stages, however when you select anything after spring Yard Zone the game will ask the player to read data from SD. If the data isn’t on the SD card, it will ask to connect to Sega Cafe. The reason for this feature is the DoJa Profile that Docomo phones have. Almost all Docomo phones can play i-appli and they have different version of DoJa profile. P901iTV has 4.0, P902i has 4.1. DoJa 4.1 and above gives the i-appli the ability to read i-appli content from an external memory. This is very useful because the DoJa profile alone is limited. As well as the maximum size you can download is small. With this feature phone can move data to and from SD card.
Did You Know Gaming did a video on mobile Japanese phone games. Sonic is mentioned. Hope this spreads awareness. https://youtu.be/tKH0x21rj1Y
If anyone would like to contribute or help we have a discord dedicated to searching for games like these and more. Help is always welcomed. Cause these games are going to be extinct soon if we don’t do anything about it. https://discord.gg/SjdHtXpa
Hopefully this info gets spreader around like wildfire. I think these games should be available to purchase on a different phone of some kind. They are unique and do not deserve to go extinct. But hopefully one day someone will look into this and help us solve the problem
Sonic Golf 3D Version: Star 1.5 Where to find it: preinstalled on CA-01C* It’s been a while and I appreciate the responses I have been getting for this type of game. I recently purchased a CA-01C becuase I was hoping to hack, mod and etc. This phone has many features that convinced me to buy it. After buying it I looked back at the pre installed games on wiki. For once Wiki is more reliable about the info of the pre-installed apps on the phone. The pre installed game is Sonic Golf 3D. I am searching for Before Crisis Final Fantasy VII and yet I find this and anything else. Maybe I should search for another game then maybe I’ll find what I want then lol. When I found out that It was preinstalled I was praying that the owner of the phone didn’t delete the game. You’d be surprised how many times I buy a phone like this and nearly all games are deleted. The phone has a touch screen too. Now purchased game I can understand but I don’t approve of It. I know it is not my decision what gets to be on the phone but deleting Demo? Anyway This game is fun. Apparently this game is a 3D version of Sonic Golf DX. I’m not sure if I can record screen footage but it does have HDMI so maybe. The manuals for Docomo phones have gotten lazy on info about the phone later on. Therefore I have had to rely on the wiki at times. Now thankfully their is footage of the Sonic Golf DX game. However the only different between these two games is the 3D version. *I haven’t full investigated if this is a demo or not. But if you want to play this game for yourself, and want to buy the phone you call go to Buyee.jp. Of course I cannot guarantee that it will be pre installed on the CA-01C you buy, but if you are willing to take a chance, then go for it. Even though I talk about searching for BCFFVII, I would love to have the rest of the Sonic Games. But this is not easy. Depending on the game it’s like gambling. Either way I hope you enjoyed this.
It took me a while to realize that I do have a P701iD which does have Sonic the Hedgehog 1 port. The only thing interesting about this version is that Green Hill Zone is the only map available. After you beat Eggman/Robotnick (forgive me if I misspelled) it asks to connect to Panasonic’s website. It does display a high score. It has a Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty. It’s very limited and I recommend getting the other phones cause they give you three maps. But it is pre installed on this phone if anybody ever wants to get it. I believe that’s it for the pre-installed sonic games on Docomo Phones. Maybe there are some for Softbank and AU? I’m not sure but I’ll continue to look seeing as how this is the only way to get them
Sonic 1 was released for J2ME in the USA as well, but not under Sonic Cafe branding. I bought it on my old flip-phone from the early 2000s and the title screen looked like the picture you shared. Anyway, it was absolutely awful. I don't remember anything in particular about the sound, but the game really ran at about 2 fps on my phone.
I have seen that variant of which you are speaking of. It looks ok. The P701iD is a bit slow in some areas too. But the later ones are much faster. Although I do enjoy the music from the J2ME and the DoJa version
I have a Panasonic VS7 (two I think) which had a special port of Sonic 1 mobile, which was the full game. I managed to find a way online to upload additional games onto the phone, but never a way to access data, so I don't think it would be possible to get off the phone.
I believe that over the years of what I have seen when it comes to hacking and preservation is that nothing is unhackable. Data gets put into a phone somehow. It does not just appear out of nowhere. Therefore it got in there, how? I don’t know, but if data is in it, then it can be taken out somehow. If anything it’s a “we don’t have a method yet known or made available to the public and/or the hard truth nobody cares at all about cell phone games enough to make it possible. It can be the latter one sadly just by looking at the many gaming devices such as the iPhone (not a game device but it’s security is still amazing though), Wii, PS2, DS, PSP and just many more that it would take me a long time to list that have been hacked. Some took a long time but it got hacked. Yet not many flip phones have been hacked or dumped. Mainly Japana cell phones. Cell phones and depending on which ones are also possibly not known to everyone in the world like most video game systems are nowadays.
Rockman Corner's preservation team have made great progress on documenting how to extract the games from docomo phones alongside starting to write an emulator for them https://www.rockman-corner.com/2021/09/rockman-exe-phantom-of-networklegend-of.html?m=1
