Pirate Dragon's very handy spreadsheet mentions Wonder Boy in Monster Land. I'm not aware of any overseas versions of that being dumped, but what is, is this: Hudson Soft ported the game to J2ME for release in China (and Japan, but this is the Chinese version), replacing the protagonist with Master Higgins from Adventure Island of course. The Java MANIFEST.MF file calls this game "新高桥名人之冒险岛" or "AdventureIsland_Macau_F_SC_VER_1_0_4". The available version has touch controls.
I briefly looked today at the Initial D trilogy released by BMIT in China (and by Sega in Asia in English at least partially, but these versions are not dumped), the midlet classes identify these games as Initial D / Initial D Plus, Initial D Sign, Initial D Restore. More importantly I took a closer look at Sonic Advance 1 on the J2ME. Black Squirrel has previously created the article for Sonic Advance (Gameloft), because it was presumed to be very different or something. Well, I opened up the files of Sonic Advance on the K800i by Gameloft, and saw Sega of China's mobile game framework from that time period (which they may have borrowed from Sega of Japan, IDK) staring back at me. The dead giveaway is the directory called "standard" (which I guess means standard feature phone) that contains introductory logos, which is seen in Shadow Shoot, Initial D Plus, this game and god knows what else. There's also a rather similar Chinese release of Sonic Advance from BMIT that is dumped (with what appears to be differently mixed music despite it being the same target device). This is in comparison to games developed by Gameloft in-house such as Sonic Unleashed (J2ME, Windows Mobile) which actually use the Gameloft engine that isn't anything like Sega's. Now, what kind of tech is used in Gameloft's low-end releases (which I have not yet looked into or compared) is another matter. Last but certainly not least, Sonic Advance (J2ME, English version) on the Samsung SGH-F480 appears to be unobfuscated. That has got to be useful for Sonic Advance 1 hacking considering what I've said above regarding the origins of the port. LATE EDIT: It turns out that an old mobile gaming publication (one that's gained a lot of notoriety for uploading a lot of J2ME "lost media" footage) has some Sega stuff: Maybe there's more.
Sometimes, things are not what they seem. As you may know, Sonic 1 Part 1 on the J2ME has some "low-end" versions made by iFone that are entirely different from the main versions in terms of tech. I also just took a look at some Sonic 1 Part 2 low-end versions for China, and while those may seem like an iFone development at first, there are some files with Chinese in the names, not to mention the midlet class name (GameEngine.MainMIDlet) which is exactly the same as precisely one other game, which is The House of the Dead: Nightmare. So I'm guessing those Part 2 low-end versions were actually made by one of Sega's Chinese studios.
Ooh nice, gives me hope that Nakayoshi Chao is out there and we'll get our hands on it soon enough... I've been wanting to make a translation mod of it personally if we do get it. Also pretty convenient given the TopGolf collab that was just announced in Sonic Central.
It's the second phone-specific i-Mode Sonic game to be preserved that is, there are also some demos of Sonic 1 and 2 on the DoJa, in addition to Sonic no Daifuugou that is supposed to be the "first" one. Very sadly, it's not only iDKStar that has performance issues, iDKDoJa also has noticeable lag in Sonic platforming games if the native sound libraries are selected, or if the system midi playback is selected, then the games run too fast instead. There's a bit of a revival of an older MIDP emulator (freej2me) called freej2me-plus, here: https://github.com/TASEmulators/freej2me-plus with plans to possibly use it in conjunction with libTAS in order to make tool-assisted speedrun replays. On the issue tracker I created a compatibility report for Sonic games. There are slightly different goals compared to the previously mentioned KEmulator nnmod, and while not as wide in terms of compatibility, this project has potential. Regarding my Sega archival project, I don't know when it's gonna finish, I keep setting plans for various preservation goals that would be done beforehand, but when is anyone's guess. I am sorry for the letdown for now.
You know I'll take this chance to point out these models are very similar to those that they used for the Mario and Sonic Olympics games on the DS. Except Amy has her regular clothes. It would be so cool to have those and the midis ripped. Unfortunate that footage has texture filtering, though...
While looking into this because I figured it wouldn't be that hard to get the MIDIs at the very least (Wasn't too sure about models but I was hoping they'd use the .m3g format that was standard at the time), I realized there's something a bit odd about this. This is Sonic Golf 3D It's got a whole different logo and isn't set in Green Hill. However the game shown matches more with Sonic Golf DX Yet is titled Sonic Golf 3D and uses the logo of DX. Strange. I wonder what happened here. As for ripping models and MIDIs I can't find a direct download, or really any downloads for any games on that so-called preservation site. So that's cool.
Kilo, I messaged you about this, please take a look. However I don't think it's gonna be simple, DoJa games (not sure about Star) don't use the midi format for music, they use the MLD format (which is called i-Melody, not to be confused with the other phone ringtone format called i-Melody). I don't remember if there's a convertor to MIDI from this format that exists yet. As for models, I think it was standard for this platform to use Mascot Capsule format graphics, which is an absolutely stupid proprietary API that was used overseas only on MIDP on Sony Ericsson, and sometimes on Motorola and Vodafone, unlike most high-end MIDP phones that used the more standardized M3G spec for 3D graphics. The Sonic Golf games are a mess, of course there is also Sonic the Hedgehog Golf which is more like the golf mode from those fangames than any other official Sonic Golf games like the aforementioned ones.
2D Sonic Golf I know to be a lost cause because it's encrypted. Or at the very least it's not the job for me to crack because I'm no reverse engineer, I just stare at code really hard and then say "I think this does this" and be wrong anyways. Edit: Sure enough now that I got my hands on it, Golf 3D is using i-Melody and Mascot Capsule. That certainly throws a wrench in things. Edit 2: Turns out, it wasn't actually that hard to rip the music. Awave supports .mld. Most of the sound effects are seemingly just someone randomly hitting piano keys, so that was fun to sit through. Will upload to Youtube tomorrow.
Regarding Sonic the Hedgehog Golf (the sidescroller), I think I've heard that there's an unobfuscated version of it like there are with Rockpool Sonic 2, but don't take my word as I have yet to take an extensive look into that game.
