So, if the mMode versions were actually DoJa, and many of the other US ones were Brew, then maybe some of the PCS Vision ones were the only MIDP ones released in the US (possibly also released in Asia). So we have three main formats right? MIDP, DoJa, and Brew. Are there any other formats, maybe proprietry Japanese ones, or are they just essentially only those but with different DRM?
Nah, I do see on the archived Sega Mobile US site that Fantasy Zone was distributed on Bell (a carrier with J2ME), and since the dumped Sony Ericsson Txxx version of the 2003 release doesn't seem to use Sprint APIs (though using those is not a requirement for Sprint-distributed games), and it doesn't look like Sprint released a lot of Sony Ericsson phones, it could possibly be a dump of a Bell distribution (that made its way to Russian sites which are the reason it's not lost). Could be worth looking into some more. There are other formats (though I don't know about Japan), but I don't think Sega released any games for e.g. ExEn or Mophun. In Korea, besides J2ME (MIDP) and BREW, there was also WIPI, which I don't know much about, I don't think much is dumped for it though, a lot of the dumps that exist you can find on https://dubigame.tistory.com/ . There was also the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick), I think Sonic games such as Sonic Jump were released on it, but in either case it really is a black hole of preservation with only 2 dumped games and no emulation.
In regards to regional distribution of games. When working on an archive update today, I stumbled upon a demo version of Shinobi 2 for J2ME, which seems to be from the same ballpark as Shadow Shoot, Puyo Pop Fever DX and Dragon Crystal (2). While the "first" Shinobi on J2ME seems to be based to some extent on the arcade original, this I believe is something new, and it looks fairly nice. Once the demo time ends, the game asks you if you want to unlock the full game for 8 RM (Malaysian ringgits), which does indeed seem about right for a J2ME game price, if you remember for how much I unlocked Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest. So yeah, seems like a direct hint as to one of the places where these games were distributed.
Hello everyone. The reason my Sega archive collection (mentioned earlier by me) is gone is because IA's virus scanners detected the Shinobi 2 demo as malware (a false positive), something I should've been ready for but wasn't, I apologize. It will be back eventually. That said, I now finished going through the "miscellaneous" Sega J2ME games, that is, ones that don't have a lot of dumped versions, likely due to low interest. Here are some of the most interesting ones, some of which I have briefly mentioned in the discord server, but it's nice to mention it here as well for good measure before enough info is collected for wiki articles. Hopefully I'll remember to spoiler the screenshots. Bullet King - Tama-Oh - this is a bullet hell shooter (and i do mean it) seemingly from the devs of Sonic Darts and Sonic Bowling, it's probably one of the better things they've done if so, with decent gameplay and music, but the feeling of Sonic Darts never goes away. Spoiler: Screenshots Butt Brawl in Animal Land - this is some kind of weird "fighting" game that involves quick action in hitting the opponent and balancing, I think. I don't really get it. This one gets a mention just because of the graphics alone. Spoiler: Screenshot Fantasy Zone Part 1 and Fantasy Zone - ports of the arcade classic to the J2ME. What's dumped are versions of the single-part game for 176x208 Nokia phones (looks like originally Sega made this one for 240x320 resolution, and then downscaled the graphics and game logic or something) and Part 1 for 128x160 screens with status bars at the top and bottom - although I'm not actually sure that this is correct because it looks like the width is somehow less than 128, perhaps it's not for Sony Ericsson, but for some obscure American phone like a Sanyo or Kyocera with a non-standard resolution compared to European phones. Also, I briefly looked at the archived Sega Ages website and saw a Japanese version title screenshot that says "Fantasy Zone Part 1" - it's just the website that calls it Fantasy Zone P1 (and Part 2 and 3 were also released according to it). Spoiler: Screenshots Monkey Ball 3-in-1 and Monkey Ball Demo (yes, I know it's "SEGA Monkey Ball", but then Lady Commando and Psychic Fantasy are SEGA Lady Commando and SEGA Psychic Fantasy respectively) - the former compilation from Tectoy Mobile (version for Siemens 132x176 phones) provides us with the only existing dumps of AiAi's Funhouse and Monkey Ball Bowling (and a version of Monkey Ball Mini Golf), while the latter is the demo version of a top-down SMB adaptation, this version specifically preloaded with the Samsung SPH-A500. Spoiler: Screenshots OutRun - yes, there was a J2ME OutRun port, with the only version preserved being a Siemens version from Tectoy Mobile again, though it opens with a Sega Mobile US logo. Spoiler: Video Racer-XXX (RacerXXX) - perhaps one of the most mysterious games on this list. It's a time trial racing game (maybe you get to compete later, IDK) with nice graphics and music. Two versions are dumped that show Sega's name, but what may or may not be the case, is that (judging by the game's title and some other things) is that while this is the kid-friendly version, an adult-oriented version was also offered. Spoiler: Screenshots Others: AfterBurner II, Golden Axe, Penguin Luv (Doki Doki Penguin Land), Shinobi, Space Harrier, Wonder Boy are ports of (or based on) classic Sega games. Dragon Crystal (released in Japan as Dragon Crystal 2) is the sequel to the GG game. Home Run King 2 is a baseball game of some sort with weird and funny title music. Ikari Warriors and Paperboy are games from other companies released by Sega Mobile in North America. In Europe those were released by Elite Systems. Lady Commando is some kind of top-down shooty game with a female protag (was it the only idea behind the game?) Mr. Racoon's Tightrope Act is another balancing game with a long title, this one does have nice graphics though (in the vein of Yoshi's Island) and a beautiful spelling error in the title. Psychic Fantasy is some kind of RPG in slightly over 50kb for the English Nokia 176x208 version (it's more than that for the larger res version, but all they did was upscale the graphics with nearest neighbor for that one). Puyo Puyo, Puyo Puyo 2 and Puyo Pop Fever DX (the latter is available for Nokia 176x208 phones and for 640x360 touch screen phones) don't need an introduction, but those are indeed the cursed mobile ports. Shadow Shoot, Sonic Bowling, Sonic Cricket (by Indiagames), Sonic Darts, Sonic Fishing, Sonic Hopping, Sonic Jump (the first one, released by Tectoy Mobile), Sonic Racing Kart (released by Tectoy Mobile), Sonic Tennis are the more obscure Sonic games out of the J2ME ones. Space Gunner is some kind of space shooter.
Good morning everyone, I'm sorry if I'm posting too much in succession, I'm not sure if this really counts as double posting or more, if it does, then please tell me what to do. While looking at Sega Retro wiki articles, I started noticing this: Well, you know what I think about it, that the system is J2ME (with MIDP and DoJa specifications), while these are the distribution channels, it's like calling Google Play Store and Samsung Galaxy Store two different platforms. At the very least, it should be specified in the articles for the distribution channels which platform they used, and possibly in the game articles as well. For the European released games like Sonic 1 mobile, there have also been curious situations like "J2ME, Get It Now" due to incomplete documentation being done here on J2ME platforms. This calls back to Black Squirrel's posts about all the different phones being released in Europe for which the games were released, which brings me to the main topic. If we're keeping on with the distribution channel stuff, then my suggestion for the infobox for the European phones would possibly be to group by phone brand, and for American and Japanese phones by carrier. See - various device vendors had their own special things for J2ME. One of the main things was that many carriers and manufacturers' phones had proprietary Java APIs built in - for example Sprint and SoftBank (in the US and Japan respectively) used MIDP, but with their own API sets that could be used in games (and they often were). Similarly, the likes of Nokia and Samsung also had their APIs (meaning inevitably that many Nokia games won't run on many Samsung phones without modifications, or at least won't work correctly). In addition, certain screen resolutions were only used by phones from certain manufacturers (Nokia's 176x208 and 208x208, Siemens' 101x80, 130x130 and 132x176, etc.), and companies such as Siemens, Motorola and LG had their own keycode layouts incompatible with the common one (though one of Motorola's layouts was also used by the manufacturer Alcatel and the carrier SoftBank). For Sonic 1 on the feature phones that would be: System(s): HTC phones, LG phones, Motorola phones, Nokia phones, Sagem phones, Siemens phones, Sony Ericsson phones, Verizon Get It Now. (As an aside, the HTC, LG and Sagem versions of this game for J2ME are not dumped, the info is from iFone's site) If you can come up with something better that uses this core idea, hats off to you. Some people use decompilers to see what imports are present in each class, and which ones stick out (the ones that don't start with "java" or "javax") - those are imports of the proprietary APIs. If you don't want to mess around with those, I've had a program recommended to me called Dependency Finder that can display the list of imports used by the JAR. Some older versions of it may work better than the newest one.
It's consistent with how we do it on PC, but as noted it doesn't work too well with mobile where you have multiple different network operators in every country. The easiest thing would just be to consider "mobile" as a single "system", and just have the different network "store" releases under releases. Alternatively we split mobile between MIDP, DoJa, and BREW, although maybe we just call MIDP "Java" and DoJa "i-mode" for simplicity with an explanation on the "system" pages as most readers won't know what MIDP or DoJa are. I looked on Malaysia's "Celcom" network operator's site and found Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Advance (need to highlight the text). I haven't had a deep delve yet so there are probably more Sega games on there. The game prices are RM 7.00, so the Shinobi 2 demo is probably from a different store.
"Mobile" is too vague - it was introduced to Sonic/Sega Retro before we knew better, and is acting more of a placeholder these days. "J2ME" is also too vague. There's at least ten years worth of phones that implement some form of J2ME, and there's signficiant compatibility problems between models. That exists on the wiki because mobile gaming isn't widely understood. "MIDP/DoJa/BREW" I don't necessarily disagree with, but we might still want to sub-divide. I'm conscious that on the Japanese side at least, Sega has already neatly classified some of its games, and we ought to be following their lead no matter how odd it seems (see also: Sega's take on game "genres" not always aligning with reality). Given Sega did this, I think there is merit in pairing games with carriers - that's where all the release dates and pricing will come from. However this too would need sub-dividing because not all phones are the same. And there's also games which weren't aligned to a carrier. So I think, outside of Japan the safest bet is to list phone models. It could make for some horrendously massive lists, but I don't know if there's another way. It would be like | samsungwhatever_date_us=200x | samsungwhatever_date_us_sprint=200x | samsungwhatever_date_uk=200x | samsungwhatever_date_cn=200x if we agree that, for example, there are four distinct versions of Sonic Unleashed mobile spread across 34289230949832 handsets, we could have four pages. We might be able to avoid listing hundreds of phones per game. Although it might make for some wacky comparison pages. Importantly if we're a also hosting the JAR files, we can see which dumps are missing if we do it this way. The problem is I don't know how many distinct models of phone (which were officially supported by Sega) there are out there. Japan is an outlier because manufacturers seem to have coalesced around standards - if nobody else was doing that, the wiki needs to reflect the absymal nature of the market.
Just a note that while we're not "PHONE RETRO", this may be a case where we want to be proactive in documenting mobile phones from this period. Like for example, supposedly the very first Sega-related mobile game seen in the US was Borakov, a game so rare that not only have I not seen photos, I don't know which specific handsets it was built into. As good internet citizens, we probably want to provide an overview of what these platforms were - Wikipedia's coverage is spotty at best, and while I wouldn't expect us to document the entire mobile industry, we're in a good position to provide some historical context behind these devices. Sega released games for the "Nokia XXXX" - what does that look like, when was it released, did anyone care at the time, etc. Right now the internet will provide you with a big list of handsets, some basic technical specifications, and a guess at a release year. Future historians might want to know why there was so much choice, and why X game was or wasn't available on Y handset - it's the sort of knowledge that will be lost to time because only a subset of a subset ever cared. I'm looking at this J2ME emulator now and there's a dropdown containing 2349803284053 different phones. I've no idea which were good or popular ones - it's just numbers and letters. I think we can do better.
The only issue with this is that I don't think it will be easy to tie specific jars to specific phones. I'm guessing that they used the same jars for many similar phones. So we may end up listing the same release multiple times. It does have the benefit that we can just go by what phones the webpages say were supported, but it's going to run into three figures for some games, and I don't know how we can split it by versions if we don't have a way to tie jar files to phones.
Besides the issue of massive lists, you would only be able to rely on info from official archived sources when it comes to releases on the various phones, because the usual dev practice (as you might know by this point) was to not mark all the versions anywhere but in the filename - and warez releases didn't always retain the original filename, far from it. Often times the people who bought and uploaded games would provide vague or even misleading info on what the version is for, such as "for Siemens 132x176" - while such versions would likely work fine on a variety of those, it's true that in the build system there was probably a specific model assigned to the version, with other similar models also being fit for it. While the only time I can think of seeing more than 1 different Siemens 132x176 device version is for Sonic Jump (2), which could be an indication of most such devices being extremely similar in specs, it's unfortunate that such info is often lost. As for misleading or missing info, I can think of Sonic Darts, where the sole dumped version is sometimes mislabeled as a 176x220 version for Sony Ericsson (even though it's for 176x208 Nokia judging by the game's resolution and the quiet music), Sonic 1 Part 2, where SEclub made a warez release of a Siemens 132x176 version as a general purpose 128x160 version (even though it has Siemens keycodes for the Softkeys and D-pad, making it hardly usable on other phones) and a 240x320 version for an unknown phone as a Nokia N73 version (I doubt this because it doesn't seem like an N73 version to me for various reasons), and other unrelated cases where me or someone I know had to fire up a decompiler to find out the target device for the game by things like which keycodes the game even uses. My buddies make https://lpcwiki.miraheze.org/ which is a decent info source for what it is, I'm sure they'd be grateful if you link to their articles on phones and such. Ofc https://www.gsmarena.com/ has a huge database of phones (though with a few errors in some places) if you need something. Still it's unfortunate that so much info is buried, I don't know what I can possibly do to leverage that. This is true though, it's one of the most inconvenient parts of KEmulator nnmod, I've suggested to the author to revamp this system and replace it with a more user-friendly double system of "choose resolution out of presets, choose keycodes out of presets, edit if needed" (where the resolutions and keycodes would be all the common ones used in dumped JARs at least, like: 128x128, 176x220, 240x320, etc. / keycodes from Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, etc.) With an argument being that the list is inconvenient without prior phone knowledge. I hope in one of the next versions it's gonna be done. In addition to what I wrote above, there were some funny cases like Doom II RPG repurposing the version for something like Samsung SGH-G400 to also be the version offered on the Sony Ericsson K800i. But generally speaking there are patterns you can see in J2ME version distribution, though sometimes I'm still left to question the devs' logic as to why only these phones (and not those phones) received a more complete version of some game, or why were there slightly different versions of some game with minuscule differences for seemingly extremely similar phones.
We do have some means of coping in Template:ReleasesMultiFormat. I would hope that obvious families of phones (as in, same device, different form factors) can be treated as one format (e.g. "Nokia XXXX series"). I think it's inevitable that the tables will look ugly, but at least they'll be "somewhat accurate". Mystery or badly labeled JAR files can be treated like bad ROM dumps - mark them as garbage, with the view of replacing them as soon as better alternatives turn up. I would guess nobody knows exactly how many bad (or missing) JARs there are right now - we can use the wiki to highlight what needs fixing. If we don't understand all of the content, that's not a problem - we're bound to understand some of it, and that's better than nothing. Just the act of being public-facing could inspire others to jump in with a solution.
Is this dumped? The only coverage of this "Shinobi 2" that I know of came from HG101 like a decade ago.
I have a lot of different Chinese dumps of Shinobi 2, the only thing is I couldn't work out how to get the emulator to display Chinese script, it just displays squares instead, but the game is playable. Malaysian network operator "Digi" had a Sega section. Finally one which was archived, except they detect what phone you're accessing on in order to show you compatible games, thus "0 games available for your generic web browser", and we're still none the wiser on Asian releases ... Edit: First appeared 2008-08 (need to view page source) and listed until 2011-08. Edit 2: Finally some progress; Malaysian network operator Maxis Communications also had a Sega page, again not archived, but they did feature many Sega games on other pages. Whilst the links are dead, the urls contained game descriptions and other details such as price. We're surely missing many other games which didn't feature on the main page, but I found the following. It does look like many Sega Cafe games made it to J2ME in Asia, and probably in English, along with some Sega China releases; SEGA Athletic Golf One of the most popular girls MAHIRU from SEGA, challenges the golf this time. But if you know MAHIRU, she likes to challenge new stuffs always so the golf is also totally new and exiting. SEGA Baku Baku SEGA brings a totally new dimension to the puzzle classics Baku Baku. With the new ChuChu Rocket Guide all the ChuChu space mice through cat-infested Space Ports to the safety of the escape rockets. Faithful recreation of Sega Dreamcast original! SEGA The Club They can be anywhere.Hidden in the dirtiest backstreet,the dark deserted industrial areas or the labyrinthine venice canals.A sinister group gathers in secret to play the most ferocious sport on the planet,where their very lives are at stake. Sega Columns Jr In Columns Jr., you can enjoy shopping, customize and create your own Columns by make the jewels disappear. You can purchase many Background music, Jewels, characters, games and so on... Sega Depth Charge In Depth Charge from SEGA, you are the captain of a destroyer. You must battle wave after relentless wave of enemy submarines and bombers. SEGA Fireworks Rumble Let's Firework em, The bad aliens Invader UkiUki to save the planet!Enjoy the beautiful fireworks and archive the incredible chain explosions! SEGA Head On The original dot-collecting maze game makes its small-screen debut in Head On from SEGA. Maneuver your racing car through level after level of dot-grabbing, lane-changing fun ? SEGA Initial D Stand Out Race against your rival to win the game. SEGA Monkey Ball Segas simian superstar is rolling straight onto your handset.In SEGA Monkey Ball,guide your monkey.Try to correct yummy yellow bananas as many as you can!Aim for the perfect collection of yummy bananas through the whole rounds! Sega Monkey Ball Bowling Play 10 frame or Challenge Pin Mode. You can choose from 4 different Monkeys. Start Monkeying around! SEGA Monkey Ball Mini Golf Those funky monkeys are back and in a brand new mobile game! In Monkey Ball Mini-Golf you ll be have loads of fun and challenging mini-golf holes to play. If you re a fan of any Monkey Ball game, you ll go bananas over Mini-Golf! SEGA Pengo SEGAs old school Pengo comes back! Pengo requires you to press the enemies by blocks and gather Diamond Blocks for high scores! Pengo is highly addictive and needs you to be alert and quick with your fingers! Who said penguins are stupid? SEGA Penguin Land You have to deliver the egg to your cutest but angry because of hungry girlfriend. Be careful not to break it! Beware of bears and moles because they want to steal the eggs from you! Sega Psychic Fantasy One of the best RPG games from SEGA. SEGA Puzzle Pack 2 in 1 addictive puzzle fun! Take the challenge in a double dose of SEGA's much loved puzzle games- Columns and Puyo Pop! Play SEGA's 2 instantly addictive classics and challenge both your thumb and your mind! Sega Pyramid Magic You have discovered that there is a mummy guarding an amazing secret deep inside this pyramid. To uncover the mummy's mystery, travel through the baffling mazes of the pyramid and that is the only way to reach your goal. SEGA Shinobi 2 Shinobi2 is the sequel of SEGAsclassic action game Shinobi. This title is the adventure of the lady ninja-Honoka,who is the 18th inheritor of Oboro clan and works as a CIA afent. Sega Sonic Billiards Here comes the genuine Nine Ball pool game with Sonic and one of his best rivals Shadow to your handset from SEGA! Achieve the chain pokects to feel the real vibes of the pool hustler with Sonic and Shadow! SEGA Sonic Billiards Here comes the genuine Nine Ball with SONIC and his rival SHADOW! There are two game modes in this full-dressed billiards game. SEGA Sonic Bowling This is time for SONIC to challenge bowling.Once you manipulate all of the meters, SONIC goes rolling down the lane.Enjoy Bowling with SONIC and his friends anytime anywhere! SEGA Sonic Fishing Is Fishing boring? May be so if there is no fish and time limit which you don't have to worry like this Sonic Fishing! Why don't you try SONIC FISHING; it will be the first breathtaking fishing! Sonic the Hedgehog 2 CRASH Sonic The Hedgehog speeds back to mobile in classic platform action with Tails, his famous fox friend. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 CRASH. is the blue blurs latest adventure based on the first half of the classic SEGA MEGA DRIVE game, Sonic The Hedgehog 2. SEGA Sonic The Hedgehog 2 DASH Sonic The Hedgehog speeds back to mobile in classic platform action with Tails, his famous fox friend! Sonic The Hedgehog 2: Dash! is the blue blur's latest adventure based on the first half of the classic SEGA MEGA DRIVE game. SEGA Sonic the Hedgehog Golf The world is now his playground! Sonic has decided to play SEGA Sonic Hopping Hop the world with various traps made by none other than the calculating Dr.Eggman who is working under dark and sinister motives.Hop-Step-Jump and get all of the rings scattered in the field. Sega Sonic Hopping 2 Two steps forward and one step back, this simple movement generate thousands of methods to conquer this puzzle game with Sonic! Sega Sonic Mine Sweeper The thrill stays the same, and there are more game plays added such as challenge mode which Dr. Eggman tries your inspiration and ability to find hidden traps. SEGA Sonic Putter Some say Putter is Money.Read lines, aim, and hit a ball right! There are always chances to get Hole In One.One of the best one-thumb game in Sonic Casuals has finally rolled onto your mobile! SEGA Sonic Reversi SEGAs superstar, SONIC plays Reversi this time. The operation is quite simple, all you need is sandwich the opponents stones with yours in order to Reverse them. Who gets more stones will win the match. Enjoy playing Reversi with SONICs friends! SEGA Sonic Tennis SEGA's superstar, sound speed hedgehog Sonic plays tennis this time. Enjoy tennis matches with your friends Tails, Knuckles,and Amy to get the prize! Go Sonic! Beat the others with the mighty Sonic Smash! SEGA Space Rescue You are the captain MET! Your mission is to rescue all the casualties in aerospace. Shoot down the numerous aliens, dodge the meteors in the cosmic space.Battle against powerful bosses by Super-Zoom and save the casualties! SEGA Sports Mobile Golf Playing a full 18 holes of Sega Sports Mobile Golf! Drive the green with your skill as you triumph over the elements, tricky hazards, and even yourself. Aim to score birdie, not bogey. The challenge never ceases. SEGA Touch de UNOH_Hexagon Paint Let's train and evaluate your right brain performance which controls creativity and intuition of the human being. This game teases your brain and enhance your right brain performance joyfully with a simple operation. SEGA Virtua Tennis With changing camera views and simple controls, you'll be a pro in no time; and the dramatic Replay Mode will let you relive the glory of your winning score. Wonder Boy Monster Land Monster Land, one of the most critically acclaimed action RPG from SEGA,has finally appeared on your mobile phone. SEGA Xi Yang Yang Lian Lian Kan 人气卡通喜羊羊与灰太狼的官方手机游戏正式推出，喜羊羊连连看由世嘉亲力打造闪亮登场。喜羊羊可以抵挡住灰太狼的猛烈进攻，从而保护住所有的羊羊们吗
Comparing that list I compiled with the list of devices explicitly supported by KEmulator nnmod... https://segaretro.org/Sega_Retro:Todo/Mobile_Games#The_phones eeehhh. Most JAR files suggest using devices that, on the surface, don't appear to be supported by the emulator. In practice it's not quite as black and white, since the emulator's looking for specific APIs and will run most of the J2ME games from this period you throw at it, but it's not a great user experience. e.g. that 3D version of Crazy Taxi posted says is labeled as a "Samsung GT-S8000" game. That's not in the emulator's list, but it'll still emulate it. In fact only six devices show up as distinct platforms in both lists: Motorola E1000 Motorola L6 Nokia 3220 Nokia 6230 Nokia N80 Sony Ericsson W810i
@Black Squirrel I don't know if it's a great idea to treat mystery or badly labeled JAR files as bad dumps, since, for all intents and purposes, some of them do appear to be unmodified dumps even. And yeah, the device list in KEmulator is more of a reference than anything, since KEmu doesn't actually emulate the devices, it runs games on a J2ME implementation (on top of Java SE runtime environment) which is one and the same. Some of the phones in the KEmu list have slightly incorrect properties I think. @JaxTH Yes, it's dumped, in fact there are "two" English versions dumped: https://archive.org/download/Psychex/Psychex.zip/S/Shinobi 2.jar - this is the Malaysian demo version in English that gets picked up by antivirus false positives because of the SMS sending stuff. On PC emulator it should be fine because it doesn't send SMS there. I think if you select "buy" then it shouldn't bother you for a while, but I might be wrong about that. https://archive.org/download/Psychex/Psychex.zip/Lite/Shinobi 2-Lite.jar - this is some kind of lower-end version, unfortunately the dump is corrupted and gets cut off at some point. I originally overlooked it because of this, but either way it doesn't work on emulator because of this, or probably on real hardware either. @Pirate Dragon Absolutely insane research and discoveries. I'm glad that we have dumps of what we have, at least. Edit: Sorry I forgot to mention. In KEmulator nnmod, you can display Chinese text by setting the font to "System" in the settings.
When I say "bad dumps" it's more... "not good dumps". Until we can verify exactly what they are, we can't claim they're good. Anyway I've modified Sega Retro, turning Code (Text): | pcs_date_us=200x into Code (Text): | mob_date_us_pcs=200x e.g. Sega Fast Lane - this solves the carrier issue. Now we just need a list of handsets, so we move away from the generic "mobile" one.
As far as I can tell, non-MIDP platforms which Sega released games for; Brew; [JP] EZweb [US] Get it Now (Verizon) [US] Alltel [AU] Telstra DoJa; [JP] i-mode [US] mMode (AT&T) [SG] i-mode (StarHub) [TW] i-mode (Far EasTone) Probably some more, but not many. These should be easier to make a list of handsets for as i-mode didn't last too long outside of Japan so there weren't many models released, and Brew phones seem to have had a proprietary ASIC. Edit: @TwoSpaces Thanks, that worked! Going by what TwoSpaces was saying it seems that we should be able to find out the manufacturer, resolution, and MIDP version each jar was meant for, so could we group phones by those specifications? Looking at the specs for Sonic Part 1 Nokia phones; Nokia 6600 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia 6630 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia 6670 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia 6680 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia 6681 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia 7610 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 Nokia N70 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 It seems probable that the same jar would run on all of these, although performance would vary depending on CPU speed etc. Now would they go to the effort of optimising for each and every model, or is that just to be expected if you have a slower phone? Edit: And the same for Sonic Advance in Malaysia; Nokia 6020 128 x 128 MIDP 2.0 6030 128 x 128 MIDP 2.0 2330c 128 x 128 MIDP 2.1 5200 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 6060 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 6070 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 6101 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 6080 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 3110c 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 2630 128 x 160 MIDP 2.0 2760 c 128 x 160 MIDP 2.1 7610 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 N70 176 x 208 MIDP 2.0 5300 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 6131 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 6280 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 6300 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 7370 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 N73 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 N95 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 5610 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 6120 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 e51 240 x 320 MIDP 2.0 5130 240 x 320 MIDP 2.1 5310 240 x 320 MIDP 2.1 5800 360 x 640 MIDP 2.0 N97 360 x 640 MIDP 2.1 I don't know if MIDP 2.1 had enough benefits for them to develop versions targeting that version specifically.
If we can guarantee the JARs are the same, I guess tradition would be that we'd only list the earliest model and claim the newer ones were backwards compatible. But determining the "earliest model" is... well. The human race really dropped the ball here - having precise release dates might have been a tall order, but I'm sure it could have been narrowed down to the nearest month. Or at least the nearest quarter. First Google result for "Nokia 6151" https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6151-1596.php No release date, just "announced June 2006". wasn't Duke Nukem Forever "announced" in 1997 Wikipedia says it was released in Q4 2006 but it doesn't have a reference - it sounds like a vague guess. I don't think anyone actually knows. Can't even use sensible tactics like model numbers - all those phones listed above come from 2004-ish, and 6600 < 6151. It's pre-iPhone so these were largely considered tools rather than collector's items, but we had the internet - you'd think someone would write it down. Oh well.
I think we could ignore MIDP version for now, we could always split later if necessary. Yeah, it will be difficult to find an exact release date for every phone, especially when some might have released in developing markets first. We'll just have to make educated guesses.
