Some more platform compatibility links, for the Czech versions at least; https://web.archive.org/web/2009102...bil/logicke/monkey-ball-mini-golf-1004727.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2009053.../hry-na-mobil/zavodni/88600/detail-sega-rally https://web.archive.org/web/2011010...i/sonic-and-sega-all-stars-racing-88981-d.asp https://web.archive.org/web/2010031...novky/sonic-the-hedgehog-part-2-1004751-d.asp https://web.archive.org/web/2010010...hry-na-mobil/arkady/sonic-unleashed-88874.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2010020.../hry-na-mobil/arkady/sonic-spinball-88901.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2009121...mobil/logicke/virtual-tennis-2005-1004825.htm And 2 more iFone ones; https://web.archive.org/web/20060708034615/http://www.ifone.com/chuchu?page=compatibility https://web.archive.org/web/20060717073431/http://www.ifone.com/monkeyballgolf?page=compatibility
What's up. Sonic 1 / Sonic 1 Part 1 was "built-into" Panasonic phones in Japan (and Europe?), but I would say it's more correct to say it was preinstalled, otherwise it might sound like the games are not Java or BREW-based, but part of the firmware or something (like Rayman Garden, which is derived from ExEn software, but it was only available as built into Mitsubishi phone firmwares). It was also preinstalled into certain variations of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung phones in Europe. A demo version of S1P1 was for sure preinstalled into Sony Ericsson W910i (Orange FR) because someone told me about how they played it on this phone when they were younger, and with some digging this version was found - and likewise a similar demo is preinstalled into Nokia 3120c (240x320) from some Spanish carriers, and so is the full version of S1P1 low-end on Nokia 5070, 6070 and 6080. These Nokia/SE high-end demo versions have the first act of Green Hill and then ask you to buy the game from Glu's dead site. Samsung's demo is different, and it lets you play GH1 and a small part of Marble 2 (I think?) before cutting to the screen that asks you to send an SMS to buy the game or go back (buying the game doesn't download anything, it's just locked behind a randomly generated code). I don't have a list of Samsung phones on which the game was preinstalled. It's possible to find dumps of these phone firmwares, from which software can be extracted, although it's not the most straightforward process. As for Panasonic (ha ha), the game was apparently preinstalled on some EU phones that I don't know anything about, but more interestingly, it was preinstalled on two Japanese models, I believe it's the full version, but once you get to Labyrinth, the game wants to download the level data from the now-dead server. Only an incomplete dump of one of these two versions exists, not in the sense that it only has the base game data up to and including SY3 (although that too), but that the SDF files essential for a complete dump weren't extracted. Though the community for Japanese phone games is active (much to my dismay since I'm more interested in overseas games), and especially if I bother them, complete dumps of both versions with the SDF files are probably gonna happen. Sonic 1 was released in two parts for J2ME (MIDP) and in one full game for BREW and for DoJa. The low-end versions exist for part 1. Maybe those also exist for the Chinese release of Part 2? I don't really know for sure. BREW also had kind of a low-end release with a simple art style, although I do believe it used the same engine as high-end, just the graphics are entirely different from any other Sonic 1 version, the FPS is low (even more so than in Sonic 2 J2ME), and there's no water deceleration effect in Labyrinth. It's not the same type of thing as J2ME low-end. Sorry if this message was disorganized, it's 1 AM and stuff, I can try my best to dig up sources and send it privately if needed, though some of it would definitely be difficult to trace to media of the time. P.S. Exodus 1 (possibly related to Exodus 2 by Game Square Interactive) is dumped, but it is credited to "Seaox" which was also behind the game "After Dark". Exodus 2 by Game Square Interactive is not dumped.
Was a full version of Sonic 1 ever actually distributed? The DoJa version I had was still only part 1 with the option to download part 2 into it, which is nicer than getting a part 1 app and a part 2 app and then using progress codes, but still not really a "full game". Especially now that the Sonic Cafe servers are down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061023163716/http://www.segamobile.com/Sonic_The_Hedgehog I think this is referring to the BREW version on Verizon Get it Now and Alltel being the full game.
What Pirate Dragon said, but also, it depends on how you understand "one full game" I guess. There was a Final Fantasy game dumped recently where you can hardly progress because as soon as you exit out of the dungeon the game was saved in, the game asks for a server download. This stuff was used a lot in DoJa via the i-mode service.
I combined all of these (minus Virtual Tennis - that's not Sega), trimmed off some of the excess and got: 340 platforms... although there's still probably some duplication in there.
Okay, my plan... maybe. I'm struggling to condense the list above - I came into this assuming it would be a bit like cars, where you'd have manufacturers sharing the same underlying technology, just badging it up for different regions. Maybe you'd have a traditional brick design, and a clamshell, and a slidey one - same phone, different housing. Because why would you waste time making 4389023840234239 different flavours of a mid-2000s feature phone when half the time the selling point was "how good is the camera". But every manufacturer I've looked into seems to be treating each handset as a separate platform. J2ME and its various extensions might be shared, but the resulting software always seems to be tailored for a specific phone. I'm curious to hear from actual developers - it looks like there are toolchains that will deploy a game on multiple devices, but it looks like an almighty faff to set up, and I can't tell if it produces 34280923 JAR files at the end of it. This is a period in human history where we'd evolved enough to put developer guides online, but you still had to pay for them, or were hidden behind log-ins, which the Wayback Machine isn't going to pick up (assuming it can get past the Flash). Also I'm not prepared to install 43289032 SDKs for 15 year old versions of Eclipse to test the theories myself. So I think the best course of action is to mirror the compatibility lists for the games above, weed out the obvious duplicates, and cull systems if and when we find they're not important. That is unless we can find genuine hardware lists like we have with the Sony Ericsson range. It also means the quest will be to find the associated JAR file for every platform in that list. The wider internet often assumes the same JAR across multiple handsets - I'd rather we be sure. If a version of the game works on a handset that isn't officially supported or mentioned by the publisher, that doesn't count, just like we don't list all Mega Drive games as RetroN5 titles. If we're dealing with situations like Sonic 1, which was both sold as one game, two games, and demos of two games (at clearly different levels of fidelity), that might be a good excuse to split the page. If we end up with a dozen flavours of "Sonic 1 mobile", so be it - it's the industry's fault for being awkward.
Interesting plan, but I just don't think they had 340 versions for all 340 phones. Taking as an example the amazingly-titled Gameloft game Abracadaball, it seems to me that Dedomil (the owner of the eponymous website) did a mass purchase of versions for the phones in the highest demand, and sometimes the versions were named after the same phones (e.g. Nokia N95), but not other times. The Samsung SGH-F400 was one of the devices that Dedomil often bought games for, but that one is a version for Samsung SGH-Z540V, whatever that phone is, with the name F400 tacked on to the end of the filename (possibly by some kind of script used by Dedomil). I still think that most likely buying Abracadaball on the F400 gave you the Z540V version, though this official interchangeability might've only applied to Gameloft games or even only to this game. Also, when trying to officially buy a game not supported for your model, you would've usually just gotten a "not supported" message denying you the purchase.
Well this was a nice surprise, their website is archived well too; All European Sega i-mode games with compatible handsets; https://web.archive.org/web/20081113120113/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/chuchu_rocket/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081020012652/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/columns/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081013231931/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/monkey_ball_mini_golf/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113072724/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/outrun/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113081810/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/puyo_pop/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113013446/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/puyo_pop_battle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113080851/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/sonic_bowling/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081015100445/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/sonic_darts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113050114/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/sonic_gammon/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070625054138/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/sonic_panel_puzzle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113081013/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/sonic_tennis/ https://web.archive.org/web/2008101...b2/games/sonic_the_hedgehog_version_concours/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081113081421/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/space_harrier/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081112045045/http://www.zenops.com/web2/games/speed_dx/ Google translated from French; Here's the UK operator O2's i-mode games page with mention of Sega. They even had a demo page for the Sega service, but the demo doesn't work, maybe the files still got archived. Anyway, back to what I was originally looking for before I came across that. O2's game pages for normal MIDP games with handset compatibility; 2 In 1 Sega Game Pack Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Football Manager Quiz SEGA Rally Sonic at the Olympic Games Sonic the Hedgehog Part 1 Sonic The Hedgehog Part 2 Sonic The Hedgehog 2- Crash! Sonic 2: Dash! Sonic Jump Super Monkey Ball Tip 'n Tilt Now I'm tempted to go hunting down old European i-mode phones ...
I can almost guarantee that there aren't... but there's no way right to determine how many versions there are. Unless one of the old severs turns up on ebay we may never know - nobody kept records. So the safest route is to assume the publishers are correct.
We could also split pages between i-mode, MIDP, and BREW. That would at least save having another nearly 50 European i-mode handsets added to the 170 listed by i-Fone for Monkey Ball Mini Golf, and would also split Sonic between full game and 2 part games automatically.
Adding all of the handsets above, the wiki managed to display 19/64 for Sonic 1 Part 1 before we hit the loop limit. It checks against every handset (and then multiple languages for said handset) and got through all of LG and most of Motorola before it gave up. Although I don't really understand because it still saved. But the iFone page only lists the 19 and it also takes an age to load now because of the SQL queries and this is getting a bit beyond me now.
I had some thoughts last night and I think I've partially solved these issues, however for these mobile platforms, I've had to reduce the recognised regions to just "world", "uk" and "cn". The loop limit per page is set to 3000, and there's several hundred phones to iterate though. Multiply that by regions and you're only going to be able to manage three or four - the templates will need a rethink to get past this. So for now, when adding content, pretend that it works, and one day it might.
Righto so here's a full list of supported phones on Sega Retro. We might need more, but it should be most. The task is to translate the compatibility lists posted above into something the wiki can understand. This requires a brain, because some of the listed phones are minor variants of others. And of course if there are massive differences between versions which warrants a split page, that'll be something to consider too. Sonic the Hedgehog Part 1 is the best example right now of how to do this. Most games already have a presence on Sega Retro, and are sitting in this category with the wrong release info.
Having seen Sonic Unleashed's source code, for that instance at least, it seems to be worse. Unleashed appears to have different source code branches depending on the platform, with the one we have being for the Samsung B3410 and F480L. Meaning there's probably like 30 different instances of Unleashed's source code for all the platforms it's available on.
Here's what I've done with Nokia, which should be the worst, probably. Generally ones with a letter on the end are just minor variants, "Four number" models without a zero on the end are often fairly minor variants, but not always. I went through all of those, but it's somewhat subjective without anything official. I decided to combine where the differences were "peripheral-like", i.e. camera, bluetooth, NFC etc as I'm not aware of any games that used those, but they may need splitting if that turns out to be wrong. As of December 2013 381 devices are listed (this is the developers site, so older devices you couldn't develop for are not included), but the lower pages were only archived up to May 2013, so I got 368 devices, although a deeper search would probably find some of the late-2013 releases. Microsoft bought Nokia's devices business in April 2014, so I'm not how that worked after then. I thought this didn't really matter as no-one was developing Sega J2ME games then, but now I see that Sonic Runners Adventure got a J2ME release in 2017, possibly just for Russia. So that really expands the timeline for phone models, although maybe not so many were getting released in that period. They're all linked to their developer pages with specifications, and many have pictures we can use. I split Series 40 and S60 by software versions, I haven't bothered splitting the others yet as some of these are oddballs which probably never had Sega software developed for them, more research needed.
From a Sega perspective, mobile isn't too frightening - outside of the Japanese games which are mostly done, we're talking maybe 60-70 games in total. Or about two 32X libraries-worth. There could be more that are undocumented (and god knows how many wacky Chinese versions there are), but it's a less daunting task than say, NEC Retro, where you have hundreds of games for a computer nobody understands and you have to trawl 40 year old magazines to get clues. I also think you can roughly split the library into four: - 2001-2002: The very old stuff (aka Borakov) where we're talking built-in games in monochrome - 2003-2004: the simple colour games that were tied to special stores (PCS Vision, mMode etc.) - 2004-2009: the "interesting" period where you could download J2ME games from 432912304 websites - 2010s: weird post-Android one-offs (like Sonic Runners Adventure) I fear much of the pre-2004 library may have been lost to time. The rest we'll have to dig for, but I don't think the internet is aware of just how much digging is still left to do. Either way, there are far more phones than games.
