I know this is an old post, but I wanted to clarify for how goddamn ridiculous Wonder Boy/Adventure Island is. So, the name of the game is actually SHIN Takahashi Mejin no Bouken Jima, which would be roughly translated as "New Master Takahashi's Adventure Island". Now, immediately, if you're familiar with Wonder Boy and Adventure Island, you'll realize why this is so damn confusing. This is because there is already another game called New Adventure Island. That one, in japan, is called Takahashi Mejin no SHIN Bouken Jima, which released in America as New Adventure Island. Note the location of "Shin" in that title, that would translate as "Master Takahashi's New Adventure Island". That game was pretty much an enhanced remake of Wonder Boy 1. To further complicate matters, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap was released in japan on the PC Engine as Adventure Island. Fucking for real. Like, the actual english name, not a translation. I swear they do this shit on purpose. Apparently HG101 agreed with you to a degree:
I don't actually like HG101 because of their absurd hatred for European home computers, which is why I didn't feel like checking their review again, but I appreciate their attempts at research into mobile games there. I have played a bit of The House of the Dead: Nightmare (another game that seems to be Chinese-developed from what I can tell), and that game seems unironically good, even if the English localizations of both Shinobi 2 and HotD:NM are poor. Sega seemed to put a decent amount of production value into these releases, even if they aren't always well-designed.
That ImportsViewer program seems to be a Java decompiler that just lists symbols - useful to a point, but only if a game uses old APIs. Having a look at those two Crazy Taxis above, the 1.0.7 version has Nokia sound stuff in it, but the 1.0.5 version doesn't. In fact I'd go so far to say that neither of them were specifically made for the Nokia 5200, they (presumably) just happen to run on that platform. Or were extracted from that model of phone. Or whatever. In a sense this is good news, because it looks like many of these newer J2ME games really do just target a MIDP standard and a specific resolution (although some might scale..?), which means there probably isn't 48932492374392432 versions of each game hand-crafted for each handset. The problem is they might not have been marketed or distributed that way - just because the game will run on "phone X" doesn't mean it was meant to. e.g. if a game was sold as a built-in game with the device - yes you can extract the JAR from phone X and put it on phone Y, but it was never officially released for phone Y. I don't know how rare that situation would be or how much we should care at this stage. Anyway it means that the 1.0.5 release Crazy Taxi abovei is not "Series 40 3rd Edition 128x160" as the 5200 moniker would imply, the platform is more like "MIDP 2.0 128x160". The 1.0.7 version meanwhile is "Series 40 1st Edition 128x160" because there are specific Nokia libraries to handle sound. tl;dr both are mislabeled. So I guess there are two tasks 1) identify any "bad dumps", where someone has gone in and edited the files, and see if we can discount them 2) Re-label the JAR files so that they reflect the actual target platform. If not just because "201155O4025113.jar" isn't helping anyone right now. but by all means do correct me if I'm wrong
I apologize for the harsh generalization then. Ok, before I go to correct you on the main point, I'm gonna tell you the big "secret", which is that back in the day, games usually weren't dumped from phones, people instead used computer browsers with fake user agents from phones to download the specific game versions they've bought. That's what you may think. However, if you launch Sonic 2 Dash low-end (240x320) for the LG phones on a Nokia s60v3 FP2 phone, you will see that the game runs poorly at about half-speed - I bet this isn't the case on LG phones because that version does not target a MIDP standard and a specific resolution, it targets LG phones. You will also observe something similar if you run a Sony Ericsson version of Sonic and All-Stars Racing on that Nokia phone, or the s60v3 version of Shadow Shoot on a Sony Ericsson phone (more on that later if I don't forget). Case in point: These filenames with device designations aren't pulled out of nowhere - pretty much this format is what I saw when I managed to buy some games from Gameloft Store by myself: See the filenames of the JAD files. JAD files are text files that are unique with every purchase or can contain personal data depending on the store, so preserving those (original JADs or otherwise) seems like a wild goose chase to me. Regarding 1, usually it's easy to see when the files are edited and when something's obviously not right. Personally I don't think any dumps from the internet from the old "scene" can be taken as trustworthy, but they're far better than nothing. However I can see the importance of marking definite bad dumps. Regarding 2, I can see that the way I did the archive ended up being inconvenient, even though I aimed for authenticity. I will likely try to see what I can do in the near future. While some things are obvious (e.g. when it says "SonicAdvance_Nokia_N73" it's Sonic Advance for Nokia N73), some other things might stick out the most to someone with experience. Shadow Shoot (English) has 2 versions with 240x320 resolution, one version has a large app icon while the other one has a small one. Large icons were usually in use on Nokia s60 phones (and indeed that version works best on those, and it's probably what it's for). And those Crazy Taxi versions probably need a revision from me...
Assuming the distributor labeled it correctly. Ideally I'd like to be able to infer the required specs from the code, but that doesn't seem possible in a lot of cases. (this isn't a criticism of your archive btw - it's an excellent jumping off point. It's more about presenting information on Sega Retro to people who have limited understanding of this subject (e.g. me))
