Filtered this for duplicates and added it to the wiki... and there's a whole bunch of phones that haven't been mentioned before, mostly Samsungs and a few Motorolas. While I do secretly suspect Nokias phones can be grouped by "OS + resolution" rather than specific models, there's a huge amount of variance in their designs, which has me think that even if we did that... we'd still end up with dozens of pages (and we can't prove anything without 32984032 dumps). But with Samsung... I mean they are so boring. They're clearly not all the same phone (this is the slide design - the half of the library were clamshells), but if they're this "predictable" with the phone cases, I can't imagine they spent a huge amount of time overhauling their operating systems for each iteration. Motorola lie somewhere in the middle - a bit more exciting than this, but few of their handsets would be considered design classics. Prior to these additions, I had made pages for about 70-80% of the phones we might have to care about (i.e. most of the links were blue). Sega Monkey Ball has changed that - I think there are still duplicates here, but there were a lot of phones in the early 2000s. It's both physical and digital e-waste.
Well done for managing to keep motivated to finish adding those ... I was looking at an archive of an old symbian warez forum, and the nokias were grouped by "OS + resolution" there too, which kind of re-enforces that was what was important. Samsung did use a few different operating systems, mainly proprietary ones, probably related to the ones Sony Ericsson used, but also Symbian too. I haven't looked that deeply into it yet.
If we were "Phone Retro" we'd want to collect photos of every variant of every phone for completion's sake. But you'd have to be pretty dedicated to the cause for that - there can be minor aesthetic differences between regions and carriers, but it's painful enough already, so I'm in no hurry to go hunting. But it isn't entirely unavoidable, because the latest set of games has pushed the Nokia 3300 up the charts. Which is the Nokia 3300? Both. In Europe and Asia, Nokia went for a "proto N-Gage" design*, while in the US, a full qwerty keyboard. Internally I think they're the same, and they have the same name, but... well. This company was insane. *pedantry time - the N-Gage was supposedly announced before the 3300, but didn't come to market until afterwards. Also because it's absolutely obvious and you would never guess otherwise, both 3300s were marketed as "music phones" because they had MP3 support. Not games, not business, music.
I've been using the Legacy Portable Computing wiki as a better guide for determining whether hardware is the same - it's helped reduced some of these lists considerably over the last few weeks, but it too seems a bit confused as to handle some models: so remember this https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-X426 Yep fine, the X426 and X427 are broadly the same. https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-X450 Oh but the X450/X458 is a non-American version https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-E100 And the E100/E108 is apparently the same hardware https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-E105 Oh and there's an E105, and the P100/P107 are marked as "similar". That's four pages covering what could be the same hardware. Not their fault - Samsung made their phones confusing and they're not just interested in games, but yeah, a nightmare.
The reason I haven't added those Thai lists to game pages is because without letters, I don't know what most of the Sony Ericsson phones are. But Bullet King only lists Nokia phones, so I added and filtered down the list and... That's 93 Nokia platforms. Surely they can't all be separate JAR files... I mean, some of these handsets probably debuted after the game (though it's tricky to put precise dates on anything). The only reason I went down this route is because current dumps specify certain models of phone, and when I didn't realise there were hundreds of models, that seemed fairer than "SERIES 40, 128x128". How do we know all phones in that category received the same JAR file?.. and so on. And so, 43 of those handsets currently have pages on Sega Retro. If you're playing at home, that means we're not even half-way there. Other games don't specify this many Nokias so while it did seem odd, it wasn't too odd. But the more I understand the hardware on offer, the more likely it seems "OS + resolution" must have been the development target - tailoring games to this many handsets can't have been feasible, even if I do manage to reduce the list further. So I'm half-tempted to go down this route (at least for Nokia where we understand it). Exceptions would be if a game was pre-installed with a certain model of phone (although I'm not sure this is ever a Nokia thing?) I'd deploy Template:MultiReleaseTable as seen with pages like the Visual Memory Unit so we'd still have a pretty detailed list of phones that meet the criteria, the only issue I'm not sure how to cleanly solve is tight memory constraints, i.e. if the JAR file was bigger than what the phone could safely load. Maybe we don't let that affect categories, just like not all Windows PC games will run on all Windows PCs. So for example, if a game advertised support for the "Nokia 3220", we'd translate that as "Nokia Series 40 2nd Edition; 128x128" (or "Nokia S40v2; 128x128" if that makes you feel better). I assume backwards compatibility is a thing (tell me if it isn't), so we wouldn't list the newer OSes with that resolution. Of course, I say this, but Series 60 was used by some LGs and Samsungs so maybe it wouldn't be clear. Dunno, it's all a mess and I hate it.
I think they were usually backwards compatible, the main one that wasn't was; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_(software_platform) But presumably phones with newer OSes could have different versions with more features so we'd want to include those too. They still released lower powered phones with older OSes after the latest OS released as the phone had to be above a certain spec to run it.
Okay here's some Series 40 experiments: Galaxy Patrol Series 40 1st Edition Series 40 2nd Edition Series 40 3rd Edition I might replace the tables with auto-generated lists - I originally thought we might kill the individual phone pages, but I think that might make things messier if they have stories worth telling. The individual phones won't have games assigned to them though, unless they're special. But it depends on what conclusions we come to for other manufacturers.
And it was all going so well. ChuChu Rocket! (mobile) and Monkey Ball Mini Golf claim support for the Nokia 3510i. I'm not sure I believe them. This is one of Nokia's fabled 96x65 resolution phones, and sure, there were games for this class of hardware (we had VMU games after all) but... is it enough pixels for ChuChu Rocket?
I've been using the list on the Nokia page to push ahead and make a page for every Series 40 phone likely to run Sega games. Try not to think why. Anyway the list is wrong. Not because Pirate Dragon mirrored the wrong information, but because all the databases and lists are wrong in unique and colourful ways. Ironically the problem is that the internet existed when these phones came to market. Nokia goes to a trade show and announces a few handsets, then all the fans of Nokia update their databases. This is why nearly all of them have "announced dates" rather than release dates - with old video game consoles that pre-date the internet, the announcements have been lost to time, so this is never an issue. But some phones are announced and then never released. Or are only released in smaller markets. Or have a name change. It's a 50:50 chance whether the databases will be updated, because Nokia rarely talked about new hardware after it was announced - they'd give say, a vague "Q1 2004" date, and the assumption the internet made wsas they stuck to the plan. The only way to know for sure was to scout your local phone shop, and if it's a model nobody cares about, you may never get confirmation that the thing actually made it to market. And of course if you're getting into bed with certain carriers, you might have weird, staggered releases as everyone tries to one-up each other. What's weird about this is you can have a whole network of sites offering pre-orders, repairs, new batteries (because the specs were released, and components were shared) and accessories, even sometimes digital service manuals because Nokia were that close to launch... but there's no photographic evidence of the phone in people's hands. Case in point, the Nokia 2355 right at the top of that list. I can't find it... or the Nokia 6152... or the 6165, and there's a bunch of misplaced "i"s. And then there are models that Nokia didn't want to talk about, because a big chunk of their business was catering for developing markets. so you have all these sites covering a phone https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3220-801.php https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=538 https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Nokia-3220_id840 and it looks like they know what they're talking about... but we've no idea if they can actually be trusted, because it's likely based on preliminary data. It's the equivalent of saying Hidden Palace Zone is in Sonic 2 based on prototype footage, and nobody playing the final game to find out. Just, you know, a lot less interesting.
ive been watching these edits happen with mouth agape. this is a mountain of nonsense that terrifies me, and seeing you actually make progress sorting out this mess is astoundingly impressive thank you for all the hard work @Black Squirrel
Okay, Nokia platforms go go go: Series 40 1st Edition (128x128) Series 40 1st Edition (128x160) Series 40 2nd Edition (128x128) Series 40 2nd Edition (128x160) Series 40 2nd Edition (208x208) Series 40 3rd Edition (128x160) Series 40 3rd Edition (240x320) Series 60 1st Edition (176x208) Series 60 2nd Edition (176x208) Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 1 (176x208) Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2 (176x208) Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3 (176x208) Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3 (352x416) Series 60 3rd Edition (176x208) Series 60 3rd Edition (208x208) Series 60 3rd Edition (240x320) Series 60 3rd Edition (352x416) Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (240x320) Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (800x352) I think this covers 95% of the Nokia games we might have to care about. There are some outliers like the 3510i mystery I posted above ^^ but when we're thinking "J2ME + Nokia", chances are it's one of these devices. As said before, we have to treat the resolutions separately because the JARs were optimised for specific screens. But what do all these numbers and letters actually mean? Well Nokia had two operating systems on the go, "Series 40" (which was entirely theirs) and "Series 60" (which was a UI layer on top of the Symbian operating system (I'm still going to call it an OS for simplicity's sake) - details in a bit). It doesn't look as if we need to care about most of the later iterations - the cut-off for us is around 2008, but Nokia held onto both platforms until 2014 (although realistically they gave up in favour of Windows Phone around 2012). While there are still questions to be had, the versions of J2ME seem to have been fixed for each release of Series 40/60, which is why I'm theorising that a game made for one edition of the OS will work across multiple handsets running that OS. I think speed and audio capabilities might vary, but such is the case on PC too and we never made the distinction there. Series 40 is relatively straightforward - it was used exclusively(?) with Nokia phones and hopefully won't cause us much of an issue. Series 60 is less nice because as said, it wasn't strictly Nokia's, it's a layer on top of Symbian, an OS that came from the PDA world (built on top of work from Psion, for the two people who might care). LG, Panasonic and Samsung are among other companies that used flavours of Series 60 on their phones (or "S60" as it became known... though I don't know when), and some of which were explicitly listed by Sega's publishing partners, and so are phones we need to care about. The reason Symbian and Nokia are often used in the same sentence is because Nokia absorbed the OS around 2010. There was a lot of noise around this period, because Android overtook Symbian in sales and became the dominant anti-iOS force, but while this is all lovely, it's not really a concern of Sega Retro (at least in terms of games). There's also more variance in the Series 60 line, in that "feature packs" were created between major versions. This would be a thing on Series 40 as well, but again, not sure we need to care. Do Series 40 and Series 60 share the same JAR files? I don't know. There are clear resolution differences in the early years, but I couldn't tell you if the same 240x320 version of a game shipped on both. I also don't know what the situation is with backwards compatibility - whether JAR files running at the same resolution would be tailored for different iterations of the OS. And of course we're assuming now that no games were engineered around a very specific handset - this plan might fall apart if it transpires that this was super common. I've yet to see any multi-resolution JAR files, but that risks being a thing too. The remaining 5% of games are things like the ports of Sonic Advance with touch-screen capabilities, or Sonic Runners. I don't know what devices they officially support - it could be that we need to care about the 5th and 6th editions of these operating systems after all (there's no 4th edition... no idea why). None of this solves the puzzle for the remaining LG, Samsung, Siemens, Panasonic or Sony Ericsson handsets.
https://www.lemmymorgan.com/nokia-symbian-and-s40-facts-and-faqs/ I forgot about this, Symbian native apps were .sis files for S60 1st and 2nd Editions, then .sisx on 3rd Edition ... So I think this is actually referring to native Symbian apps (.sisx apps are signed), and thus Series 60 3rd Edition and above should be backwards compatible with Java games from earlier editions. It looks like S60 could also play Series 40 Java games albeit not full-screen (at least until higher-res Series 40 phones later released). From what I'm reading though, Java games on S60 were already far worse performing than native Symbian games, so you'd probably not want to amplify that by just releasing the low-end ports for high-end phones. I'm guessing that S60 games on Series 40 is not going to work out too well though.
There are no shortcuts: The Nokia E61 has a horizontal 320x240 display. Nokia usually opted for vertical orientations (i.e. 240x320) - will they be lazy? No. There's both 240x320 and 320x240 versions of Sonic 1 out there. Try not to think about the massive borders in a game originally designed for 320x224.
It's funny considering half of the reason for the borders was to preserve the 3:4 aspect ratio to keep secrets hidden. But then also makes sense as the other reason was for performance. From Claxon back in 07:
88 pages on Nokia phones later and I'm prepared to say some form of this task is "done". There are still a few outliers, and plenty of games which don't have any platforms at all (because we don't know what those platforms were), but it maybe looks slightly better than it did before. But there's some blockers. We have games claiming they're compatible with the following phones... but I can't prove the handsets were ever released: Nokia 2355 - can't find it Nokia 2855 - can't find it Nokia 3510i - this is the "did they really make games for this" question above Nokia 6152 - can't find it Nokia 6155i - can't find it, but there does seem to be casing on the net(?) Nokia 6155 - can't find it, may or may not be the same as above Nokia 6165 - might exist but the examples are so beat up I can't tell if it's a real phone Nokia shipped some products exclusively to developing markets, so you might have to dig. I'm a bit sick of typing "Nokia". As far as finding JAR files goes, we're listing 18 Nokia versions of Sonic Spinball. If backwards compatibility is a thing, it'll be less, but yeah... find them.
The reason all parties involved were keen to say "Series 60 =/= Symbian" is because there were alternative UI layers. Or I guess one that's worth noting: UIQ. UIQ phones have J2ME support, but even though the underlying system is still Symbian, apparently UIQ J2ME is different to S60 J2ME, so the JARs should be different. Apparently. At the moment the only UIQ devices that I've seen mentioned by Sega games are from Sony Ericsson: the M600, P990, P1, W950 and W960, all using UIQ 3.0. So that's a small fraction of the non-Nokia library simplified.
RE: "becoming an expert" A couple of games on those Thai lists (yes I am still working through them) list Series 40 5th Edition phones from 2007/2008, so even though this might end up being a redundant exercise, I've had to make pages. at least they look pretty. "Nokia"'s 2024 feature phones are obviously more advanced and nicer to live with, but the aesthetics peaked 15 years ago. Anyway between the ~mystery phones~ posted above and games that lack official compatibility lists, I might not be able to proceed much further (there's one more game I think I can safely convert to this scheme), so Series 40 1st Edition Series 40 2nd Edition Series 40 3rd Edition Series 40 5th Edition Lite Series 40 5th Edition Feature Pack 1 Series 60 1st Edition Series 60 2nd Edition Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 1 Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2 Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3 Series 60 3rd Edition Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 Presenting, Nokia as a games platform 2002-2008. Ow my brain.
I don't have much hopes in understanding some platform holders' plans (e.g. LG and Siemens), but Motorola had a dedicated development site (albeit one which locked off its content with Wayback Machine-incompatible log-ins), and they were close to Sega for a bit. I feel like I should care. Thing is, Nokia talks in Series 40/60 terms, i.e. their pseudo operating systems, but nobody else seems to do that (at least publicly) - it's just "LOOK AT MIDP AND CLDC DEFINITIONS", ignoring the fact manufacturers could (and did) add their own extensions, meaning there is no guarantee of compatibility between brands. I mean they pretty much admit this by having a development site in the first place - if it was all super standard J2ME, you'd expect Sun Microsystems to run these sites instead. Motorola was big on the "KVM" or "K(ilobyte) Virtual Machine", basically the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but stripped back so that it could run on simple hardware. It doesn't seem to explicilty talk about "versions" of KVM in its material, but their Java SDK suggests the capabilities varied. And as such, they shipped the SDK with half a dozen different emulators (each with its own collection of handsets) - this might be the closest we get to grouping devices together. Assuming we even want to do that. and from a different document: A different system was in place for their older iDEN phones (basically any Motorola device that begins with an "i"), and I've no idea what the situation is with newer models. Whether "Motorola KVM A.1" and "Motorola KVM M.3" are good enough designators, I can't say.
Liar liar, plants for hire. Eight games were claiming compatibility with this, the Samsung D550. Another phone that was announced but never released. It's a recurring theme.
Hey someone sucks and it might be me. Well okay I absolutely suck because I kept typing SLVR instead of RAZR but if you ignore that... After the success of the RAZR V3, Motorola released upgrades in the form of the V3i, V3t, V3r and V3x, but at some point they decided to be annoying: They changed the name of the brand, so the V3xx update is officially called the "MOTORAZR V3xx". The original V3 was renamed "MOTORAZR V3". Later they went back to their older scheme (kinda - the branding stopped being inconsistent around the V8 and then they gave up... then revived the brand as "razr" later on). This nonsense applies to other models like the RIZR and ROKR, but most seem to be outside our scope.
