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Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Black Squirrel, Jun 15, 2024.

  1. TwoSpaces

    TwoSpaces

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    Looking at my own classic Sonic J2ME version archive (which I intended to remove in favor of the upcoming Sega archive, but I guess that's only gonna happen whenever it's done), and you can make a different conclusion about the aforementioned example of Part 1 on the Nokia.

    There's a slight misconception that all P1 versions were released by iFone, and all P2 versions were released by Glu. But actually, only the earliest P1 versions were released by iFone, then most other available P1 versions were finished under the new management and also released under the Glu name. (There is also the SEGA Mobile / Brizo Interactive version for Motorola, probably for NA, and two SEGA Corporation versions, probably for Southeast Asia, now that this is brought up). Chinese localized versions were released by BMIT and I believe also ForceGen, but collecting proper JARs of those is a bit of a tall order to be perfectly honest.

    So anyway. S1P1 on the Nokia specifically. These versions can be seen:
    • 176x208, for Series 60 2nd Edition, from iFone. No sources are any more specific about the phones than "s60v2". Also a different dump of this one exists, which also looks authentic to me, with "Glu" as the midlet vendor as opposed to iFone.
    • 208x208, from iFone. No device info that is more specific.
    • 240x320, for Series 60 3rd Edition or Nokia 6280, from iFone. There are two dumps of this one, both modified, by "daddyfatsax" (lol xd) and by Dedomil. The former claims "s60" (I can only assume s60v3 is what was referred to, there isn't anything else that fits this criteria), while the latter claims Nokia 6280, which are conflicting reports. I don't truly know who is right because this version does indeed seem to be optimized for s60v3 in terms of audio and gameplay, but the app icon (in Dedomil's dump that has the original icon but arguably worse manifest file) doesn't appear to be the s60v3 type.
    • 176x208, for Nokia N70, from Glu Mobile. There are two releases dumped of this one, one with 2006 file date, the other with 2012, with the difference being marginal. One might assume that the 2012 one is a carelessly repackaged 2006 JAR, but I do believe that it's official judging by the mention of "Metaflow" in the manifest, combined with the JAR looking like it was actually built by Glu with Metaflow. The N70 device info comes from a different warez dump of the 2006 release, but I compared the JARs, and it's a dump of the same thing, just modified or not modified.
    • 176x208, from Glu Mobile. No device info that is more specific.
    • 240x320, from Glu Mobile. No further device info, but the icon looks like an s60v3 icon because of the size and proportions, though the version from daddyfatsax runs better on my Nokia.
    • 240x320, from Glu Mobile. No further device info, but it runs at a lower FPS and has a lower res icon, so maybe it's for some of the feature phones.
    • 320x240, from Glu Mobile. No device info that is more specific.
    • 360x640, from Glu Mobile. No further device info, but I suspect it's for Series 60 5th Edition (s60v5 as it's referred to sometimes, possibly unofficially) because it seems to rely on these phones bringing up the virtual keypad in J2ME unless a specific manifest property is present, I don't think it's a thing on later Symbian S60 editions but I might be wrong.
    Glu Mobile also released several low-end versions on the different engine. But I think by now you get the idea of what kinds of stuff we're dealing with.

    I've not looked into Gameloft Sonic Advance all that much, but I'll get to it when the time comes.
     
  2. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    I hadn't considered that, but yes, the OS version the phones are running will be important. Nokia N70 was a relatively powerful 176x208 resolution phone running "Series 60 2nd Edition Version 2.8 (Feature Pack 3)", whereas far weaker phones running "Series 60 1st Edition Version 0.9" were also at that resolution. S60v2 FP3 was actually the first release to allow for higher resolutions.

    Here's Nokia's developer page with details on the different Java ME APIs supported in each version, so we should probably group S40/S60 phones by that. It should be similar for other manufacturers, but here's the ones for Nokia (and a few others);

    Series 40 1st Edition
    Series 40 2nd Edition
    Series 40 3rd Edition
    Series 40 3rd Edition FP1
    Series 40 3rd Edition FP2
    Series 40 5th Edition and 5th Edition Lite
    Series 40 5th Edition FP1 and 5th Edition FP1 Lite
    Series 40 6th Edition and 6th Edition Lite
    Series 40 6th Edition FP1
    Series 40 DP1.0
    Series 40 DP1.1
    Series 40 DP2.0

    S60 1st Edition
    S60 2nd Edition
    S60 2nd Edition FP1
    S60 2nd Edition FP2
    S60 2nd Edition FP3
    S60 3rd Edition
    S60 3rd Edition FP1
    S60 3rd Edition FP2
    S60 5th Edition
    Symbian^3
    Symbian Anna
    Nokia Belle

    No 4th editions due to tetraphobia ... The "Lite" versions were for lower-end phones, so we would probably need to separate those. Some of these will have phones with different resolutions, we could either break those down on the page, or have separate pages for each one (I favour the former). This also eliminates the need to name the page after a specific phone, although it seems to be fairly well documented which phones were the first to have each version.

    Thoughts?

    Edit:

    Some of the manufacturers used proprietary OSes with not much clarity on which phone used which versions. For example, Sony Ericsson mainly used Enea's "OSE" (as did a few others). Luckily they still had good dev documentation which showed which phones supported which features. I haven't looked deeply yet, so there's probably more up to date stuff (this one was from April 2006) with more phones, but this seems roughly equivalent with Nokia's developer page linked above;

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/developer.sonyericsson.com

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jun 28, 2024
  3. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    But surely Series 40 has ten times the 4s


    Grouping by OS is definitely an option, though I would guess the vast majority of pre-Android phone users wouldn't know what operating system they were using.

    That being said, I did some experimenting, comparing with Sonic 1 Part 1's official list of supported handsets with known dumps of the game. And while I was able to group some devices together, we could be talking 60-70 missing (or mislabled) versions if we assume the game was tailor made for each handset.


    But then would the chosen OS dictate everything? Would some of these devices have more or less RAM, or less colourful screens, or other magic features?
     
  4. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    I'm guessing they need to be roughly comparable in specs to be able to run certain versions, so should have at least the same base game, but could certainly have phone specific adjustments (ie resolution). Wikipedia does have a more complete page on Sony Ericsson's "Java Platforms".
     
  5. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    A fun outlier in that Sonic 1 list

    [​IMG]
    This is the SPV C500, built by HTC before HTC put their own branding on things. The operating system here is Windows Mobile.

    But Windows Mobile was also used for the Pocket PC. And we have games for that. So it would be "Windows Mobile for mobile phones not the Pocket PC".
     
  6. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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  7. Chimes

    Chimes

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    Black Squirrel, be honest now, have you been digging through Bing.com's search results to try and exploit those old virus-ridden sites to get the goodies
     
  8. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    So looking at the Sony Ericsson phones listed as compatible with Sonic 1 Part 1;

    Java Platform 2

    (176 x 220)
    Sony Ericsson Z1010

    Java Platform 3

    (128 x 128 )
    Sony Ericsson J300i
    Sony Ericsson K300i

    (128 x 160)
    Sony Ericsson F500
    Sony Ericsson F500i
    Sony Ericsson K500
    Sony Ericsson K500i
    Sony Ericsson K508i

    (176 x 220)
    Sony Ericsson K700
    Sony Ericsson K700i

    (240 x 320)
    Sony Ericsson S700
    Sony Ericsson S700i

    Java Platform 4

    (176 x 220)
    Sony Ericsson V800
    Sony Ericsson Z800

    Java Platform 5

    (128 x 160)
    Sony Ericsson Z520i

    (176 x 220)
    Sony Ericsson K600i
    Sony Ericsson K608i
    Sony Ericsson K750i
    Sony Ericsson V600i
    Sony Ericsson W800
    Sony Ericsson W800i


    Java Platform 6

    (176 x 220 )
    Sony Ericsson W550
    SonyEricsson W550i

    (240 x 320)
    Sony Ericsson W900
    Sony Ericsson W900i


    Sony Ericsson S600 176 x 220 (cancelled, replaced with W550)
    Sony Ericsson S600i

    Potentially 10 different versions, except Java platforms were backwards compatible, so if you went for lowest common denominator you could have as low as 4 versions. Of course, this is just when that page was made, this game was available for a long time so many other versions could have been made later.

    Looking at the dev docs S600 never actually released, they also group phones by "series", the last digit is just a minor variation of that series, and "i" is just the international version (probably just to do with frequencies as US had different ones which was always an issue when travelling there), so if you wanted to be ultra-conservative you could group phones by that metric.
     
  9. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I think the sad fact of life is that when it comes to documentation on old phones, aren't many goodies to get

    Anyway
    iFone are listing 91 different handsets for Sonic 1 part 1.

    after a bit of learning I've got the list down to 64 (i.e. just under a third are minor hardware variants). Most (if not all) of these devices were released after 2003 - I don't know if that's because the game can't physically run on earlier hardware, or if they didn't bother to mention older phones. I'm also tempted to say they're all "European" devices, which given iFone was British, might secretly mean "things you can buy in the UK". A fair number of the variants I discarded were special flavours from Vodafone, if that means anything.

    And that has me wonder whether it's anything close to a full list of devices that can run Sonic 1.


    Again I don't really know how to proceed - do I add 64 formats to the Sonic 1 Part 1 page, or do we group by something else?


    Spoilers: even if we do group by OS, I feel duty bound to list the devices running that OS, collecting photos and manuals and press material so people know what they're looking at. "It's a lot of work" isn't a barrier here - I've embarked on bigger, stupider projects in the past.


    EDIT: apparently it took me more than 18 minutes to write this post
     
  10. TwoSpaces

    TwoSpaces

    Member
    Hi folks, keep up doing the great work on the research. There's so much stuff I'm getting lost on what to say, but I do think I need to chime in once again.

    Phone system software might've been a factor, though often times WM phones (just like Symbian phones and Motomagx phones) had an inbuilt Java VM and therefore could run J2ME games, so it's possible that the HTC version was for J2ME, though Gameloft and EA did release WM Sonic games later down the line (SSASR, Unleashed, Spinball, IDK what else). I don't know, I've not seen Sonic 1 for Windows Mobile though I've not looked for one, but I've also not seen Sonic 1 for HTC (Orange).

    Sony Ericsson had the various Java Platforms, but also the various chipsets like the DB2020 and the DB3350, etc. I think this info can be found on their archived site and some old forums. Similarly, Samsung's dev site circa 2009 has some ridiculously exhaustive info on various phones of the time. I don't think iFone had 1 version for each of the 64 phones, if you remember that one forum thread where the developer Claxon was talking about the woes of J2ME development, he only mentioned LG as the platform where you had to make 1 version for almost each phone.

    Regarding phones before 2003, it just might be that those were out of support from iFone at least, I know that Glu released a Low-End version of P1 (which is dumped) that is 64kb in size for Nokia phones that had an installation limit of 64kb for JAR files (sorry, can't remember which models off the top of my head, those might not be in iFone's list because Glu was the first one to release them, not iFone), but by the time Gameloft had the rights and they were releasing Unleashed, etc., they weren't putting out 64kb versions anymore, even though some earlier Gameloft games did still have those. I would guess publishers would phase out old models (maybe a bit too slowly though) to decrease overhead on developers.

    Also, regarding screen resolutions, one thing I inevitably have to point out is that many phones (especially from Motorola, but also from LG, Sagem and sometimes Samsung and even old Sony Ericsson phones) didn't run the games in full screen, those phones ran games with a status bar at the top, and sometimes also the softkey bar at the bottom. This is where some of the skewed resolutions like "240x299" for Motorola versions of e.g. Sonic 1 Part 1 and Racer-XXX come from, even though the resolution of the full screen is 240x320.
     
  11. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    Maybe we should just do that, group by phones with minor variations. As every manufacturer did things slightly differently I don't think we can do any better than that. Here's the Sony Ericsson ones as of 2008;

    [​IMG]

    ~80 phone "series". Maybe we can get it to <1k for all manufacturers if combining like this.
     
  12. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Then let it begin: Sony Ericsson (though if that document only goes up to October 2008, there might be more).

    I'd guess some of these won't actually need supporting - it's more of a worse case scenario at this point, but something to work with.
     
  13. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    And that's just the ones running on their own OS, they also had other models with Symbian (UIQ), and others such as Windows Mobile.

    https://web.archive.org/web/2013110...om/Devices/Device_specifications/?filter1=all

    I can't find anything similar for Nokia where they group them by series. They do seem to use the same "i" or "c" on the end indicating region, so it's probably safe to assume that the same model numbers with additional letters on the end are minor variations,. But then they also did stuff like the 207 and 208 (also 208 dual sim) where the only difference is the 208 has a camera, but maybe there's some Sega games which use the camera, so we might still want separate pages for examples like that.
     
  14. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    You couldn't make this up.

    We already have a game on the wiki that was bundled with a Sony Ericsson phone: Super Real Tennis, which came with the K700 (and K750). So now that we have more of a plan, I thought I'd fetch a screenshot and make the page suck less.

    "Super Real Tennis JAR"

    "Tennis Multiplay?" says Google. "Sure okay".

    [​IMG]

    uh what - that's too advanced for the K700 and it's calling itself "Sony Ericsson WTA Tour" (except for when it calls itself "Tennis Multiplay"). Are you telling me that on my first attempt, I've managed to come across an undocumented Sega game?

    [​IMG]
    Because that's the original (which runs too fast and the slow down feature doesn't slow it down?). Notably it has men in it, whereas WTA tour doesn't. Because W.

    Problem is...

    [​IMG]
    The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour was a genuine event. So that muddies the waters even more.

    Nicely done.
     
  15. TwoSpaces

    TwoSpaces

    Member
    @Pirate Dragon Actually :eng101: Nokia's "c" stood for Classic, as opposed to "s" which stood for Slide, in which for example the Nokia 6700c and Nokia 6700s are two entirely separate phones because I don't know. Also, Samsung's "i" stood for "i-mode" unlike that of Nokia and SE (the latter had "im" suffix for i-mode). Yeah...

    @Black Squirrel I don't know much about Super Real Tennis, but I'm pretty sure Tennis Multiplay was an official game that came preinstalled with some SE phones, including apparently some K800 variants. I'm not the one to ask why they called it Tennis Multiplay here and Sony Ericsson WTA Tour there.
     
  16. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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  17. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    Yeah, but there are also examples where it stood for China (see also 9210i).
     
  18. TwoSpaces

    TwoSpaces

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    It's a WIPI game I believe, not MIDP. Also, KEmulator nnmod supports Mascot Capsule, either via the implementation borrowed from J2ME Loader, or the official one (which is more compatible albeit dependent on Win32) from the DoJa SDK.
     
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  19. Pirate Dragon

    Pirate Dragon

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    A bit stuck here, can't find any more leads, but Thai developer "Game Square Interactive" claim to have ported Sega games to J2ME from 2005-2011 and published them in Thailand. Maybe these were who Sega used to port DoJa games to MIDP for release in Japan/Asia.

    [​IMG]
     
  20. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    So

    Sonic the Hedgehog Part 1

    To the surprise of nobody, the wiki doesn't like a bazillion platforms. I think it's in the wrong and I hope to get a fix for this, but it might be a forewarning to split up low-end versions from high-end - it's going to be a very chunky page when we're done.

    Scary thing is, this is only the first half of the game. Full fat Sonic 1 obviously had a release too, and oh

    [​IMG] [​IMG]
    https://web.archive.org/web/2006010...jp/pmc/news/en/article/2005/2005_05_0519.html
    (I hear his real name is "Matsushita the Hedgehog")

    Sonic 1 was built-in to six Panasonic phones. I think Retro knew this once upon a time, but we preferred not to think about it.