The Sony Ericsson phones are missing letters, which will make that a pain to work through. I think this is grouped by manufacturer -> screen resolution, which is what I'm hoping the JARs will look like, but we'd need a bazillion more dumps to absolutely guarantee that nothing is being missed.
Would it not be far off to compare this to trying to write about Ashoka in spite of the fact most sources are two thousand years old and some of them have giant chunks missing Because I'm getting mad archaeology vibes from the amount of missing pieces we have here
Initial testing: this is one platform for Columns over the last week or two some of these handsets have got pages: Nokia 3220 Nokia 6020 Nokia 6230 Nokia 6030 Nokia 7260 Nokia 2610 It's certainly feasible that all of this are running the same 128x128, 65K colour version of the game. But The Nokia 5140 only has 4096 colours to play with. No doubt Columns doesn't need anywhere near that many colours to run, but means you could optimise a game for the 3220 that won't look good on a 5140 (and that's just resolution and colours - there could be RAM requirements or wacky Java features separating them all). We could say this is a 5140 game and all the others are backwards compatible, but a) we don't know if the Nokia 5140 represents the minimum specs b) the site might be wrong (I spotted a few "okia"s) and any of the others could represent the minimum specs for something else, so we can't suddenly merge pages. hey kids are we having fun
...and the Nokia 3100 (3105, 3120, 3125), another 128x128, 4096 colour phone, is listed separately. As are some others. Sense makes no.
Yeah plenty of weird Nokia phones capable of running Sega games, if that list is to be believed. I thought we might have escaped the Nokia 7600, but not quite. Although this doesn't count because I remember this existing. I don't remember the 3100 GAMING, with its sub-Game Boy resolutions. Or the 3108 and 6108 with their ~handwriting recognition~ and massive styli. and all this weird swiveling stuff like the Nokia N92 (that's also a TV) A lot of this was too expensive to be of any use to humanity, but when every new phone is just a rectangle, I can't help but feel we've lost something.
Seems to be related to OS; Series 40 1st Edition Nokia 6100, 2650, 3205, 6800, 6810, 6820, 7200, 3125, 6610i, 3120, 3108, 3105, 3200, 6225, 3100, 6108, 7250, 7250i, 6585, 6220, 6200, 5100, 6650, 6610, 7210, 6170*, 2355, 3300, 6560, Series 40 2nd Edition Nokia 3220, 6822, 6235, 6235i, 6020, 2626, 6255, 5140, 6230, 6030, 7260, 2610, 6021, S60 1st Edition Nokia 3600, 3620, 3650, 3660, N-Gage, N-Gage QD, S60 2nd Edition / 3rd Edition (initial release) Nokia N70-1, N72, 3230, 6600, 6670, 6260, 6630, 7610, 6620, 6681, 6680, N70, N72-1, 3250, 6682, N91-2, S60 1st Edition Nokia 7650, Outliers are the 6170 which Nokia says is Series 40 2nd Edition. Maybe that's an error or maybe there's some other spec which puts it with the 1st edition phones. 7650 is listed separately despite being a S60 1st Edition phone, it was however the very first S60 phone, so maybe it's just under powered compared to the others. It's probably only horizontal resolution that's important, those 128x128 games will display on a 128x160 phone with OS stuff taking up the extra vertical res. I saw that on some of the videos on segamobile.com (TwoSpaces also mentioned something similar).
Apparently the 3100 derives from an older phone, the 6100, the only difference being stylistic. However I'm also told the the 6100 has "a similar feature set" to the even older 6610, so maybe that should be the base. What does that mean? 6610 -> 6610i -> 6560 -> 6585 -> 7250 ----> 7250i ----> 6610i ----> 3200 -> 6100 ----> 3100 --------> 3105 --------> 3100b --------> 3108 --------> 3120b --------> 3125 15 different Nokia phones might be the same thing. But they also might not be. My instinct was also to group by Series 40 1st Edition... but there are other models in that range with different resolutions and colour depths*. And apparently the 6585 has more memory to play with and better sound, and there are fewer patterns with later editions of the OS. *e.g. the Nokia 3520 has a "high resolution" 96x65 display.
With regards to colours, I'm not sure that any Sega games even use that many colours, and even if they did, wouldn't the phone just display the next nearest colour? That's how it works with CD+G (4096 colour palette) on Mega-CD (512 colour palette).
Pirate Dragon actually nailed it without realizing, which is that Series 40 1st Edition phones (afaik) had a JAR installation limit of 64kb, while 2nd Edition upped it to 128kb. Therefore devs had to scrunch the games down to the bare essentials until the likes of Gameloft in the late 2000s finally dropped support for those. Maybe I'm wrong... This is judging by my experience with Samsung phones (with their JAR installation limits of values like 300kb), and JAR dump examination of various games for these Nokia phones. However, whether 128x128 games would run on a 128x160 phone with system HUDs is up to which brand and series it is. If it's a Nokia game on a Nokia phone, then it's gonna be a white rectangle at the bottom with optional graphical glitching. I was probably talking about stuff like Motorola, LG, certain Samsung and Sony Ericsson models and their respective games, which did often sacrifice screen real estate for the status bar and/or the softkey bar. BREW games did that a lot too.
Pretty much every pre-Android mobile game I've seen is targeting really low colour counts (like, sub-256), but I just know that as soon as we say palette doesn't matter, we'll unearth a game that uses a 16 million colour title screen or something. Unless there's genuine technical reasons why J2ME games were limited, colour wise. This is claiming to be from the true colour Nokia 5800, and according to my count, uses a whole 169 palette entries. I'm not sure I understand the choices here (although I do suspect Gameloft have warped the original image for widescreen, and may be trying to hide it). Usually the answer might be "nobody cared enough about mobile games", but in 2009 it would have been more work to convert down to 256 colours. The lazy option would be to use the same quality you'd see on a PC.
Unfortunately it looks like its in some sort of filesystem to me, and it appears to be fragmented. Someone would have to work out the filesystem (hopefully its not proprietary) to extract the JAR.
I had another attempt at scavenging Nokia's old development website for clues, and from a development perspective, it seems you did target specific iterations of the OS, as opposed to specific models of phone. You also set which versions of MIDP and CLDC to use, which in turn grants you access to a base set of J2ME features. When it comes to attempting to run a J2ME application, these details, outlined in the Manifest, let the device know what the application is expecting, and the device can decide whether it's compatible. What I don't understand (without setting up old versions of Netbeans or Eclipse which again, I'm not going to do), is deployment. We've seen the same games targeting different resolutions - each one exists as its own JAR file, but there's no mention of the toolchain creating 2348902340 different JAR files to suit every device. That makes me think this is something developers did on their own accord. My best guess is that because resources were so limited, the theory doesn't line up with practice. The point of Java is to "write once, run anywhere" but I if you put 32490238403 versions of a game in one JAR file, you'd either reach memory limits when trying to run the application, or the runtime checks were too computationally expensive. So just like kemnnmod, you could attempt to run a J2ME optimised for 640x480 on a phone with a 128x128 screen, but it would probably die because the phone didn't have the memory to store a 640x480 screen buffer. So it's easier (if un-Java-like) to build multiple versions of a game, and have something decide which version you get when you download. This means strictly speaking you could organise Nokia J2ME games by combinations of OS, MIDP and CLDC - that's more accurate than specific models of phone. But as decisions might be being made on screen resolution, audio, 3D-ness and god knows what else, I don't know if it's feasible when we haven't got a full set of dumps. And if there really were different JAR files tailor made for each specific type of phone (which we also don't know), the point is moot anyway.
I think the main reason for not including multiple phone configurations in one JAR was file size. Not only the JAR size limitations of each phone, but also limitations imposed by network operators. The bigger the JAR size, the more it cost to download.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Mobile_Games#discovery I've generated a list of phones with resolutions and colour depths. Maybe this will give clues to how many versions of games there really are... or maybe it won't. And of course not all phones have pages on Retro so it's not a full set yet but: LG 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) LG 176x220 262,144 (18-bit) Motorola 128x128 65,536 (16-bit) Motorola 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) Motorola 176x220 262,144 (18-bit) Motorola 176x220 65,536 (16-bit) Motorola 240x320 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 128x128 4,096 (12-bit) Nokia 128x128 65,536 (16-bit) Nokia 128x160 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) Nokia 176x208 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 176x208 4,096 (12-bit) Nokia 176x208 65,536 (16-bit) Nokia 208x208 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 208x208 65,536 (16-bit) Nokia 240x320 16,777,216 (24-bit) Nokia 240x320 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 352x416 262,144 (18-bit) Nokia 800x352 16,777,216 (24-bit) O2 176x220 262,144 (18-bit) Panasonic 240x320 16,777,216 (24-bit) SAGEM 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) Samsung 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) Samsung 176x220 262,144 (18-bit) Samsung 240x320 262,144 (18-bit) Siemens 130x130 65,536 (16-bit) Siemens 132x176 65,536 (16-bit) Sony Ericsson 128x128 65,536 (16-bit) Sony Ericsson 128x160 262,144 (18-bit) Sony Ericsson 128x160 65,536 (16-bit) Sony Ericsson 176x220 262,144 (18-bit) Sony Ericsson 176x220 65,536 (16-bit) Sony Ericsson 240x320 262,144 (18-bit) there's all the unique ones. Obviously if we think the number of colours doesn't matter, that'll shorten it further.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070103072248/http://sega.jp:80/kt/docomo/hod/ The House of the Dead (Mobile) Here's the Google translated description; And the Malaysian description; Supposedly this is the version that was supposed to get released in the US, it's "3D" unlike "The House of the Dead: Nightmare", which is top-down. The description does sound similar to the original. The earliest mention of this on the Malaysian site is from 2010-11-12, whilst the files for the various Chinese versions date between 2010-08-24 and 2010-12-06, at least for the ones I checked. I'll assume that it's actually Nightmare due to the dates and the use of the word "nightmare" in the description, but there's a possibility it's actually a port of the original Japanese mobile release. For Puyo Pop Fever both the Thai and Malaysian pages don't mention Mini or DX versions, so I'll assume that they are treated as the same game, just what version is downloaded will depend on phone model as in Japan. The clue's in the url (gmsq = Game Square), this wasn't AIS's site, but Game Square's as they also mention details for downloading on the other two main operators (DTAC & True Move). Some other US releases (may have only been these three games); https://web.archive.org/web/20081004011457/http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9943438-1.html https://web.archive.org/web/2008042...amejump.com/WhiteLabelWeb/details.htm?id=1493 https://web.archive.org/web/2008051...jump.com:80/WhiteLabelWeb/details.htm?id=1490 Whilst the Sega versions with ads weren't archived one non-Sega game was, so you can get an idea of how the ads were implemented (minus the ads getting updated through the connection).
Okay the site is definitely wrong - some games are being listed as compatible with the Samsung E217, and it doesn't look like that phone made it to market. It was revealed at the CTIA 2005 trade show, but mysteriously disappeared. So yes I think they've looked at specs and decided "all these phones fit" without doing any real testing. Did I ever mention that this is a confusing mess and I have no idea what I'm doing.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tj1W8jvbKQNCv214hv5EnmntU75vWwYtSUyQaRXkO3g/edit?usp=sharing Up to 129 games released in European languages, there should be a few more Asian releases (and maybe some TecToy ones), and there will be more when I add the Chinese releases. Probably missing quite a few French Canadian releases too.
That website is from the dev who I think Sega got to port their games to Asian handsets in English, so maybe the E217 was a target in Samsung's SDK. I see that Samsung also had a pretty indepth developers site with handset details. They also group phones, there was an "E210 Group", so maybe it fell into that category.
