Hey all, I'm back from vacation. I looked at this spreadsheet again, and noticed the game "Sexy Ninja Fox" in there. Well, there's no such game dumped, but Sexy Ninja Foxy sure exists, with no ingame copyrights whatsoever, but I do notice some similarities with the enigmatic Racer-XXX. On which website does it say that Sega released Sexy Ninja Foxy? I'd like to see that just because I think it's insanely funny that Sega would release a game with that title.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090123200510/http://gmsq1-th.segamobi.com:80/home.php Yeah, it should be Sexy Ninja Foxy. Might also be on some other sites but difficult to search on my phone. Edit: Didn't find on other sites, but maybe it didn't release in all markets due to it being a bit risqué. The partial Thai description and Google translation;
Remember that one day you were told about "3G phones", before 4G and 5G and Kevin Bacon told you more Gs were better? Whatever happened to "2G"? Well it existed, but not quite, and we never called it 2G. There were a few competing standards boasting ever-so-slightly faster data transfer speeds - most countries stuck with one standard (and so nobody had to care about the underlying technology), but America and a few others had more, and because reasons, that means entirely separate lines of phones. From a J2ME video game perspective, none of this really matters, but Samsung named its phones after the specific technologies they supported. "SGH" is "Samsung GSM handheld" and "SCH" is "Samsung CDMA Handheld", and these three letter codes made up the name of the handset, e.g. Samsung SGH-D500. It makes for some pretty dull and often confusing names, but most of the time you could get away with ignoring the prefix - there is no "Samsung SCH-D500", so "Samsung D500" is fine. But what if it wasn't? There was both an SCH-X430 and SGH-X430, both released within a similar timeframe. These are fundamentally different Samsung phones, but the lists of Sega games we've seen just say "Samsung X430". It could mean either, so... which handset do they mean? ...probably the SGH model, because GSM was the dominant force worldwide (and the internet won't tell me if the SCH-X430 has Java). But it's another confusing "mobile-ism" to add to the pile.
Yeah it's getting unhealthy. I've resorted to just turning red links blue, so we can at least say we all handsets were represented, but then LG threw this at me: There isn't a world where I'm going to believe that the U8110, U8120, U8130 and U8138 are all different phones. But that doesn't stop LG claiming them as such. And no these aren't just regional variants - nobody is grouping these four together (save for the manufacturers of third-party batteries). But as far as Java games go... ehh. The U8130 was meant to replace the U8110 - the specifications are not identical, but none of these were exciting, top end devices, surely as far as J2ME development goes, the difference is neglible. Maybe "LG phones (176x220)" was the better plan after all.
Apparently capable of running Sega games, the Siemens S55 Why would you do this - it's a colour phone, but at first glance it looks monochrome because they picked a sickly green as a background colour. Anyway this is another "are you sure they made games for this" situation - the resolution is 101x80, and it only supports 256 colours. We're claiming versions were made for Baku Baku Animal (mobile), ChuChu Rocket! (mobile) and Monkey Ball Mini Golf - do we believe it? EDIT: and Baku Baku is claiming support for the Siemens C45, a genuine monochrome phone.
Tried making Template:MobileList as a solution to making the Bobs less bloated for the mobile games by making the huge lists a collapsible list, but right now it's not working properly with Bobs so will need to be fixed up.
I don't know of many games that have Siemens 101x80 color versions, but one game off the top of my head that does in fact have one is Rayman Bowling (which also has a Nokia 96x65 monochrome version, I'm guessing for Nokia 3410): Also, you may think that game companies wouldn't consider anything legible on phones like these, but the existence of Tetris (by THQ Wireless) for Motorola 96x64 monochrome phones makes it seem otherwise. (Yes, I know that there were actual model names behind these phones and not just "Siemens 101x80" etc., but I don't always know these by heart)
Okay I've decided: LG is the awkward child. A few games list compatiblity with the LG KE970, a phone from 2007. And this phone totally existed (look - LG still offer the manuals)... if posting a photo of one wasn't enough. Problem (doesn't that just make you want to buy a phone) the phone was never marketed as the KE970. LG called it the "LG Shine". It's absolutely a KE970... but it's also a Shine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Shine "The LG Shine (a.k.a. SV420, KE970, KG970, KU970, ME970, U970, CU720, TU720, KG70)" because spoilers: there was more than one phone called the Shine. Some are different, some are the same, don't know what to put on Sega Retro, why did they do this.
11 games are claiming support for the Motorola A830: Currently we're up to six phones that were "definitely" not released, plus a few others that were "probably" not released. The A830... I have no idea. This was one of the first 3G phones ever made, supposedly before fully-fledged 3G networks even existed. It was basically Motorola advertising its services to whoever cared - a deal was struck with Three, and then some Three-branded variants did their rounds in the media. The phone was given to reviewers - there are plenty of write-ups and contemporary photos of the thing being used (like the shot above), so a quick glance through Google image search would indeed suggest these things were sold. But more recent photos tell a different story: Almost all of them appear to be labeled as "Engineering Prototypes". There aren't photos of complete units in boxes, and I guess just as dubious is the design itself - an entirely different back plate with a camera was made. It sounds like this was meant to be an optional extra... and yet photos of the "standard" version is harder to come by. Also The design was picked up by Siemens who produced the "U10", and theren't many photos of that either. Better yet, supposedly the battery life is really poor - talk time can be measured in minutes before the thing dies. It all points towards the idea that the A830 was developed as a proof of concept, albeit a fairly elaborate one, to take to trade shows and drum up interest in Motorola's 3G technologies, rather than something that made it to market en masse. For the record, most of the red links on mobile game pages are devices that either confusing, super rare, or incredibly dull. There are so many mid-2000s silver flip phones.
This is the best one yet - the Siemens SL6C Search for this one and you'll find games which claim compatibility, and devices that will let you flash and service the handset. However, unlike the other mystery phones that were announced at trade events or whatever, the SL6C... just flat-out doesn't exist. And has never existed. You can't buy one. There seems to be a suggestion that it's maybe a revision of the Siemens SL65 (which did exist), but still calls itself an SL65. Maybe a version of the hardware refers to itself as that internally, but from what I can tell, it's not a product in itself. For all intents and purposes, it's just a non-entity - games are compatible with something nobody really has.
where have you been all my life A few games are claiming support for the Siemens SK65, but life's got a bit more difficult now - this is a "BlackBerry enabled" device and... I don't know what that means. Are they BlackBerry games, or J2ME games running on a BlackBerry. Or is is a Siemens.
If "blackberry enabled" actually refers to app support, then it's probably blackberry apps (with file extensions like .cod and .bar) running on Siemens. Seems like a straightforward concept to me. AFAIK BlackBerry devices could run those apps and they could run J2ME apps in .jar format (but the J2ME support wasn't very conventional or something).
Here's a milestone: Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Dash! - all the red links are now blue. With the obvious duplicates removed, this is the most accurate list of platforms on the internet. Do I really think there are 74 different iterations of the game? Probably not - that's the quest that lies ahead, but it's better than the 100+ platforms we started off with. There are still red links on other mobile game pages - when a good chunk of these devices are super obscure (or super boring) I'm doubting I'll bother to make them all, especially when there's a more interesting job featuring 200+ issues of Game Informer, but it's a thing. Observations: - 128x160, 176x220 and 240x320 are dominant screen resolutions. Only Nokia opted for wacky ones. - The world understands Nokia and Sony Ericsson. LG, Motorola, Samsung and Siemens are more mysterious, with very similar phones being treated as different platforms. - There's very little variation in CLDC and MIDP versions, which means J2ME capabilities are usually dictated by the extensions - Very few people in the internet mobile phone community know how to think or type. Old forum posts are essentially useless. - All the manufacturers promoted (and supported?) phones that weren't actually released - All the third-party databases are wrong. Usually over release dates. - Most mobile phone documentation on the internet is "THIS PHONE EXISTS", despite the massive databases that seem to know everything (spoilers: they just copied official spec sheets, so know basically nothing) - There was a wide selection of phones made specifically for developing markets, usually South East Asia, South America or eastern Europe. Very little of this has been photographed, let alone documented. - By not coalescing around one "2G" standard there is a needless amount of confusion and e-waste. - Too many companies made silver clamshell phones in the mid-2000s and they've all aged horribly. - Like seriously, what a horrible design
For the record, Disney-Pixar UP on the J2ME has like 210 versions of the game or something (because someone asked me to look into that game, and jesus). I haven't inspected all of those to know whether those are all unique phone versions or if there are other factors in this. The reason so many are available is because of a freeware (ad-supported) game site that was archived by preservationists a few years back before its shutdown. Not only, there are other odd ones out like 220x176 (Samsung version of Sonic Jump "2"), 208x320 (Sony Ericsson "P-series" version of Ratchet and Clank: Going Mobile), and the less obscure 240x432, which was only used by Sony Ericsson Aino and Samsung SGH-F490, but enough games are dumped for these two. There was also an LG touch screen phone (forgot which one) with 240x480 resolution.
So, Football Manager Quiz was a port of a game available on various pub quiz machines. There doesn't seem to be much online about it (we don't even have a page), but FatSpanner's website did have a title screen; So now we need to try to find out which machines this was on, which isn't too simple as they were networked and updated OTA. It was on FatSpanner's "FatBox" line of machines at least.
My god, over the past July I saw Black Squirrel trek through that monster and the amounts of edits that I saw on Sega Retro was staggering. Hats off to you, sir, you pretty much did the impossible.
Hello all, it's been a long time, but not much of it went to complete waste on my end. I've been preparing a dump of the J2ME section of the Russian site "Spaces" (no relation to my username), and afterwards I was working on the new version of the big J2ME (MIDP) archive. Only time will tell how useful the Spaces dump will be. I've been notified that the J2ME preservationists dumped 2 new Sega game versions on the MIDP (which is rather groundbreaking considering how relatively little new MIDP j2me games get dumped). These are OutRun on the Audiovox CDM-8455 and Monkey Ball Demo on the LG LX5350. The latter is evidently a preinstalled game, but whether the former is preinstalled or bought, I don't know, it is a different build compared to the Tectoy Siemens version, as it's in English and it uses Bell Mobility Canada's J2ME APIs (which got quickly implemented in KEmulator nnmod 2.17 since they are similar to Sprint's). With all that said, I again began work on the Sega archive. It's going slowly but surely, and here are some interesting things I've learned: Chu Chu Rocket on the J2ME, made by Airplay (who also made Sonic Jump 2 and Sonic at the Olympic Games) was programmed by none other than Clive Townsend. Anyone moderately into games for the ZX Spectrum knows who that is. Shadow Shoot got a release in China from the carrier China Mobile under their brand "Monternet" and a re-release under their brand "China Mobile Games". Of course it also got English releases in Asia. Streets of Rage has several dumped official English versions. It looks like Sega released the English version around 2012 (maybe a bit later in 2013 or something) as a freeware release with the vServ advertising wrapper that would show you ads on game startup and exit (The House of the Dead: Nightmare seems to have had a similar fate). The server is dead so it doesn't show you any ads, but also the existing JAR files for this release have a cracked vServ version dated 2013. It's also one of the specific vServ variations that crashes KEmulator nnmod as of now. Anyway, the localization seems to be well-done from a technical perspective, but the translation is a similar kind of trainwreck like with Sega's other Asian releases. DigitalDuck also said that the fan translation that they contributed to, wasn't even made much earlier than the official one. They didn't find an official English version around 2012, so they began translating the Chinese release. I also don't know which freeware store was the English version released on.
Some nice finds. The earliest mention of Streets of Rage I can find is 2010-03-16 in Indonesia; Click on "Action"; https://web.archive.org/web/20100316231003/arenagames.indosat.com/index.php
Some time ago some person on Discord told me about the existence of the dumps of Chinese version of Sonic Jump 1 (not just the Portuguese version from Tectoy). Now I got to have a look at it: This is unmistakably Sonic Jump 1 - it uses its graphics, and each zone consists of 1 level. But it uses music that is also used in Sonic Jump 2, and similar story cutscenes - the Portuguese version has no cutscenes or in-game music. I'm a bit lost about this - were things removed from overseas Jump 1 to be used in Jump 2 instead (for one reason or another), or did this Chinese version add in content from Jump 2 (less likely)? It really blurs the line between the two games a bit more.
