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Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#41

Post by RobRivera »

diasks2 wrote: post #37
r0ckarong wrote: post #14

You can use Android Studio (or other virtualization / emulation) to set up an older version of Android and then you use one of the various sites that "archive" games: https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/past-releases/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/54420/putter-king-adventure-g... I've used Bluestacks to play the entire somewhat recent Monkey Island game on PC because I could not be bothered to play it o…

Thanks! Looking into this. I found the apk file and I played around with Android Studio today but was having trouble getting the Nexus device with KittyKat or Lollipop to not crash when trying to open the device. Will keep trying different options.

Based Bluestacks

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#42

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

diggan wrote: post #32
mrweasel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about. So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot. Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?

> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder? Step 1: Get a NAS or whatever, and copy over things manually when you know you care about them. That's pretty much it for at least some basic protections, and not starting a whole project. Just made checksums before you send it, and verify the checksums after you send it, and that's pretty much it. Then step 2-6 can involve doing encrypted off-site (c…

Hard disagree about the manual copying. I did that for years and that is how you get a mess. “Did I back up that project? On what date?”

You will inevitably omit something you want. Just rsync the entire home folder as a first pass backup strategy.

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#43

Post by juris »

if you do find an .apk and didn't obfuscate it with proguard (I can't remember if proguard ran default in the release pipeline in Eclipse ADT...which...ew) you can use jadx to decompile your .apk and recover the structure of your source code!

https://github.com/skylot/jadx

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#44

Post by RobRivera »

mrweasel wrote: post #10
fastball wrote: post #5

Where did the source code go? I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.

I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about. So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot. Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?

1) wire 2Tb Hdd or 1Tb ssd

2) copy-paste

3) remove, place tape and write label on drive

I've shelf-suitable boxxy memes, top quality

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#45

Post by claudiulodro »

As far as playing it, one of my kids uses BlueStacks[1] a lot to play old/beta/abandoned mobile games. It's like an emulator that lets you run mobile APKs on PC. That would be way easier than trying to find an old phone and actually playing it on a mobile device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#46

Post by sandreas »

mrweasel wrote: post #10
fastball wrote: post #5

Where did the source code go? I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.

I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about. So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot. Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?

Use the 3-2-1 strategy. 3 backups on 2 different media with 1 offsite location.

For code I use github, my NAS and burned blurays (readonly, offsite).

Syncthing is a handy tool for smaller files (e.g. documents) to distribute over multiple clients, e.g. your Android phone.

Restic is good for encrypted, deduplicated cloud backup.

ZFS can also be helpful when used with zfs-auto-snapshot or zrepl to prevent accidental data loss or ransomware attacks.

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#48

Post by lihaciudaniel »

jimkleiber wrote: post #6

I'm not sure where to find the APKs/IPAs, but once you do, I wonder if using Claude Code or some other LLM tools could help you update the app (or reverse engineer) for modern OS versions. It's something that I've been thinking to do for my 2012 obsoleted microjournaling app.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#49

Post by mid-kid »

diggan wrote: post #31
mschuster91 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

APKs are signed so assuming OP can verify his own certificate he might be lucky enough to not have to dig that deep.

If it's being distributed by a piracy site, and the game had any sort of protection to make sure people actually bought it, then probably they're storing/offering a pre-cracked version, which certainly shouldn't (or wouldn't) be signed by anyone.

This sort of protection is rather rare for android apps.

Re: Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

#50

Post by diggan »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #42
diggan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder? Step 1: Get a NAS or whatever, and copy over things manually when you know you care about them. That's pretty much it for at least some basic protections, and not starting a whole project. Just made checksums before you send it, and verify the checksums after you send it, and that's pretty much it. Then step 2-6 can involve doing encrypted off-site (c…

Hard disagree about the manual copying. I did that for years and that is how you get a mess. “Did I back up that project? On what date?” You will inevitably omit something you want. Just rsync the entire home folder as a first pass backup strategy.

> Hard disagree about the manual copying. I did that for years and that is how you get a mess.

Yeah, I'm not advising they do that for the rest of their life, I suggested that as Step 1, just offload it somewhere first. Then the later steps are setting up syncing, in my previous comment those were steps 2-6.

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