This is a great lead because I was thinking as well that some English releases such as Shadow Shoot (or maybe not Shadow Shoot but some others) might have been for those markets. These versions are too mysterious. I don't see what's wrong with the screenshot. If it's that it's actually a 176x208 game, then it's likely that the official JAD file that the game was distributed with, had a Nokia property to rescale the game (2x) to 352x416. It's a dumb resolution anyway, only 3-4 phones ever used it (that were underpowered compared to 240x320 and 360x640 phones), so developers generally didn't bother with it that much. Where does the "2 in 1" title come from? Dedomil can get the title wrong (or just weird) every once in a while, so I think it's best to go off the titles based on the MANIFEST.MF file, the title screen and common sense. ...However, there's a compilation release from Glu Mobile that has the games Sonic Jump (Europe) and Brain Genius (which is a Glu Mobile game). Dedomil does give it a title, but in this equation it's just a random site. The title screen of the compilation menu doesn't give it any proper title, and the MANIFEST.MF file calls it, I kid you not: "t4sjmpbrg". If the entry for this release on Glu's archived website (or another source like PocketGamer) is not found, one might genuinely have to make up a title for this compilation, like "Sonic Jump and Brain Genius".
So, as far as I can see iFone/Glu had exclusive EU/PAL rights to Sega Mobile games from 2005-2008, which then went to Gameloft from 2009. Likewise, in North America "Sega Mobile" were the exclusive publisher until they let EA Mobile release a few games. I'm not sure if they let Glu release any Sega games in North America, but that isn't too relevant for this point. It should be fairly trivial to get a complete list of releases for these. Any English language titles that weren't released by those are highly likely to have been Asian releases, especially if they also have Chinese language versions. I think that would include Shadow Shoot (but I haven't looked deeply into it).
One of the reasons Japanese phones weren't impossible to cover is because the manufacturers coalesced around specific standards: So we can say "hey that's a 503i game". There was only a finite number of these, and the generational leaps were pretty obvious. Here's what happens when you don't have standards: This is just a subset of phones that ran J2ME Sega games... that we know of. My hope is that in practise, there's not much difference between all the handsets with a 240x320 screen resolution, but it can't be ruled out. I see Sonic Unleashed came out for most of these, which is terrifying, but surely nobody was devoted enough to maximise the performance out of every platform.
Pirate Dragon: Seems plausible, but, another thing to consider is that a few of the English versions of Shadow Shoot that are available have a file added on by the person who dumped it, called "Supplied by harpreet.txt". Don't you think that nickname has a bit of an Indian ring to it? What if India was another market for Sega, and one where this Shadow Shoot release was published? Unless this is a false lead, and that guy just bought the game in a Hong Kong / South East Asian store. --- Black Squirrel: If you count the number of individual versions of Sonic Unleashed Mobile, it's over 100 because of device AND language releases (there are not only English and Czech releases listed there, but also some Russian and Chinese ones that exist, and some others). Try not to intimidate yourself, it will come to you gradually as you learn about this stuff :P I could help out with a Sonic Unleashed Mobile comparisons page, eventually.
I knew I poked a sleeping dragon by suggesting Columns with that one. Holy crap lol This is the kind of stuff I live for. Nice ugly name find!
This isn't actually all that helpful so I should elaborate: Gameloft released Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Racing (as the manifest file calls it for short, probably because most phones can hardly display the full title in one go) for many phones, with many versions being made, and with one version per language. In speedrunning, we divide both games into 4 version categories: 128KB, 300KB, 600KB and 1MB. These 4 range from the simplest to the most complex, and with the file size increases the amount of content AND complexity, generally (note that some super high res versions might have the "600KB" content despite being of large file size). Some 128KB versions are the only ones to use the Nokia Tone monophonic sound format (as opposed to MIDI usually). In Sonic Racing, the 1MB versions have extra characters and race tracks. In Unleashed, the 1MB versions have 3D elements in some levels. For graphical comparisons, I suppose it would be beneficial to screenshot different resolution versions of the different version categories because of different graphics sizes. Some games weren't like that, for example Sonic 1 on J2ME I would just divide into the high-end versions (for most devices) and the low-end versions (for certain phones from Nokia with 128x128, 128x160, 208x208 resolutions, and from Samsung with 128x160 and 240x320 resolutions). There were also the versions for the BREW mobile runtime which play similarly to the high-end versions for J2ME.
I helped make the translation patch for this more than a decade ago... I'll have to dig up my archives.
The more I look at this, the less confident I have in my approach. For every other platform on Sonic/Sega/NEC Retro, the topics of "who made this game" and "how could you buy this game" don't clash. "Sega made this game for the Xbox" "You buy it as an Xbox game" This doesn't work with mobile games outside of Japan. You're right - developers make "J2ME games" but how you buy them... depends. The Sprint store for your Sprint phone? That's an option, and maybe even the only option in some cases, but it's becoming difficult to ignore how the market changed, specifically: Press release: 2003-05-13: Sega Mobile Delivers J2ME™ Games through Handango Sega Mobile signed up with a service that let them sell games though their website, and maybe a bazillion other places. So you might have a "Sprint game" that is also a "J2ME game". We kind-of want it listed as both, but they're priced differently, and may have arrived on the different storefronts at different times. But as a game that someone made, it's one product. a company's softography listing every place it was sold isn't going to make for nice reading. And yet it's also not a J2ME game - it's a game optimised for a specific model of phone that utilises the J2ME environment. A "208x208 resolution J2ME game" is "a Nokia 6230i game" - there were no other phones using that resolution (that are listed right now as running Sega games), so it's probably better to list it as the latter... but I'm also not super keen on becoming ~the phone master~ to try and work out what the important models actually are. I think it needs another set of eyes. I don't mind getting some screenshots, but I'm not even sure how to name or categorise them sensibly.
208x208 was specifically a Nokia resolution, but I think Nokia probably released several phones with it, as there are two legitimate-looking Sonic 1 Part 1 versions, one from the high-end set that has a 208x208 developer splash screen (which is a big tell for the intended resolution for that game in case anything is unclear), and one from the low-end set with fixed 208x208 resolution. I don't recall fully, but at least for the low-end version, the website that dumped it (and those are often the ones that have to be trusted for these version designations) just says "Nokia 208x208", even though, with utmost certainty, there was a target device assigned by the devs to both the high-end version and the low-end version (such as the aforementioned Nokia 6230i), and if there were any devices similar in specs to the 6230i, those were likely offered the same version. (Though, if anything, there really were only 2 phones with the 240x432 resolution: the Sony Ericsson Aino and the Samsung SGH-F490) When I was younger, all I did mobile-gaming-wise was playing preloaded games on my Samsung SGH-E200B, but that isn't stopping me to catching up to this knowledge now, I guess. I really do want to help out, but "biting more than I can chew" is my middle name. Anyway, it turns out that Games that Weren't has been looking for OutRun on the J2ME for slightly less than a week, and while I don't have their main showcase piece (OutRun 2006), there is a version of the OutRun arcade port from Tectoy that somebody downloaded from a paywalled site, and since then it's been around in those huge archives. I didn't realize what I've been holding onto until now, so: Here you go. This is an as-of-yet unfinished collection of Sega J2ME games, so far it only has some of the obscure games which have few versions, but I will come back to it.
Apparently there was a "Tectoy Mobile" division that released quite a few games. But of course, their website was written in Flash and very little has been archived, so it's another dead end.
Sega's i-mode service was also available in Singapore as NTT DoCoMo had a stake in StarHub and launched i-mode there. So there may also be English variants of i-mode releases. I see that Head-On was released in the US, but as Sega Fast Lane, I guess SoA didn't think the original title was appropriate. The gameplay screenshots for Sega Fast Lane are the same as the Hong Kong J2ME release of Head-On, although I guess the title screens are different. I thought maybe Sega's service on SmarTone was also i-mode, but i-mode was only available on the "3" network there. Edit: Another Asian network which had a Sega webpage which frustratingly wasn't archived, Singapore's M1 network, so should be J2ME had Sonic Reversi along with Wonder Boy and Baku Baku.
Press release: 2006-04-05: PlayPhone(TM) Partners With SEGA(R) to Create Direct-to-Consumer Mobile Content Channel at SEGAMobile.com And another. And surprise surprise, PlayPhone's website wasn't archived properly either.
https://archive.org/details/tips-an...bruary-2005/page/n59/mode/2up?q="sega+mobile" The trend in the US is to group by carrier then by phone model, something that continued to be the case until at least the end of 2006. I guess there's a task of pairing phones with carriers (since not all carriers had the same phones). I don't know if that's something only America needs to care about.
One thing they swept under the rug at the time but is a must-know: Verizon exclusively distributed BREW games (at least for most of its lifespan), while Sprint specialized on J2ME. Likewise, the list of BREW carriers includes US Cellular, while the likes of Bell and Telus distributed J2ME apps and games. I don't really know the full extent of the things, but we'll get to those. The same phone could have J2ME on one carrier version of it, and BREW on another. Likewise, phone brand NEC released phones in Europe that had J2ME in the unbranded versions, and DoJa in some carrier distributions (like MTS Rus, in Russia, which did in fact have i-Mode for a while with games released, but the website is archived poorly as well, and I've not found evidence of Sega's DoJa games getting a Russian release through MTS Rus).
So I was having a look at this, and other lists, and something sticks out: The very first Sega Mobile games from 2002/2003 are never available. The phones that they were designed for didn't turn up in that list above, and coincidentally these are the games that mysteriously disappear from Sega Mobile's website around 2005/2006. It's like an entire generation of games is missing. There's a reason for this. The first carrier Sega Mobile got into bed with was Sprint, and you used their digital storefront PCS Vision to download things. Judging from some old forum posts, this is was only option, and now that the service is dead... there are no options. Sort of. Because it appears that PCS Vision was a very closed system, and there were extra layers of garbage to stop you downloading things from places Sprint didn't agree with. And while people found workarounds, you still can't just upload a JAR file to your Sprint phone and expect it to work - you need a JTD file for extra certificate stuff, and you need special PC software (and this assumes you can find software in the first place). And while I'm not super sure how it worked, supposedly some software would be deleted after a few days to encourage you to spend more money. So there's a very real possibility that Sega games for these phones have deleted themselves.
But those games were also available on other networks later right? So maybe it's down to the mobile warez scene being primarily based outside of the US (I'm thinking mainly developing countries) and also getting released before that got big. I've been going through a 22 GB folder of Chinese releases, haven't found any early ones there yet either.
Genuinely speaking, I'm not the best at internet research, or at least far worse than I used to be. But here's what I gathered. The JAR format is based on the ZIP format and can be opened with 7-Zip, which lets you see when the game was built via the file dates. The pre-2005-update Sega Mobile US website lists various games, the following ones are the ones that are dumped: - AiAi's Funhouse (as part of a 3-in-1 compilation, might not be the old release or a US one) - Fantasy Zone (2003 release from Sega Mobile US from an unknown carrier, and a later 2005 Sega Corporation release) - OutRun (the game is from 2006, is credited to TecToy and is in Portuguese, but it opens with a Sega Mobile US logo) - Penguin Luv (2003 game) - Puyo Puyo (2005 release from Sega Corporation) - Sega Monkey Ball Demo (preinstalled phone version only) - Space Gunner It's true that some phones are more locked down than others, some phones are pretty much completely impenetrable when it comes to sideloading custom content on them, such as T-Mobile Samsung phones. As for Sprint, these days it's sort of straightforward with a data cable and the proper interfacing software: https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Adding_content_to_Sprint_phones Could be worse. I am also thinking the same as Pirate Dragon: J2ME's increase in popularity must've been gradual. I only know one game for the monochrome touch-screen device Motorola A008 which was saved by Russians (Lock'Em Up by Gameloft from 2002, though there could've been 2-3 more that I've not heard of), but later devices such as the legendary Sony Ericsson K800i had tons of games dumped for it. And the warez scene was big in East Europe, where most dumped versions are from. I apologize for slow progress on the Sega archive, but today a power outage took down several European countries if you've not heard of that, and there was little I could've done.
From what I've seen, most PCS Vision games made it to AT&T Wireless' mMode (though whether they're exactly the same games with no changes for the differing platform, I can't say). mMode seems to be more traditional in that you actually got to keep the game you bought - there may be some hope there since the system doesn't seem as closed in, but I genuinely don't know if there's a means of getting software off those phones. mMode is based on the Japanese i-Mode so maybe the same rules apply there? It's a tough ask - AT&T were charging $8.00 for 1MB of data back in 2003, then there's the price of games on top of that. The lifespan of the store can probably be measured in months, and this was all very new to Americans at the time (the articles I'm reading suggest that most were only using phones to... phone people. Europe was more receptive of more exotic features like "sending emails").
I don't have much time anymore today for research, so I'm gonna say briefly that I'm pretty sure i-Mode distribution portals sold DoJa games outside of Japan as well, so if AT&T had an i-Mode service with games, they were almost definitely Java games with the DoJa specification. I do believe that MIDP (which was seen the vast majority of the time on J2ME phones in EU and NA, and on SoftBank in JP) and DoJa (on all networks affiliated with DoCoMo) are technically both types of J2ME, but they're not interchangeable (a phone with MIDP can't run DoJa games and vice versa, there's just no functionality to do so), so in a way they're two different game platforms (alongside the native-code-based BREW), and when people say "J2ME" they're typically talking about MIDP games. asdf_ (the aforementioned buddy who is proficient in dumping phones and phone content, they're the one who dumped the likes of Sega Monkey Ball Demo and the Sprint version of Doom RPG) says they haven't had that much trouble with phones from Sprint, including dumping the games that did actually remain on the phones. Ultimately it depends on the phone's architecture however, I've sent them two NEC (MTS Rus) phones without games, and it turns out that there's no software from the chip manufacturer (Agere Systems, of Samsung SGH series fame) or otherwise to dump the phone's internal memory, which would've dumped any games if they were there; and any JTAG ports on the phones are of no use either. I would also say from my observations that J2ME gaming and other advanced features were more popular in Europe (and Japan...) than North America.
