181–190 of 407 posts
Yesterday i just ordered myself a feature phone and now I see this tweet about game development on feature phones What a coincidence !!! Anyways has anyone still using feature phone, i would love to hear your experience
What feature phones can get on modern networks? I thought LTE "needed" a smartphone for some reason
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My very first industry job was making J2ME games and oh my god does it still give me nightmares.
If you miss it, just try Android, contrary to Google arguments against J2ME, the fragmentation experience is kept unchanged.
I worked at a startup, Javaground [1], where we ported and developed games for J2ME phones. We had a room full of dressers full of all the different mobile phones of the day. Each phone had different implementation quirks, such as variable audio delay when playing a file, audio/image formats that were faster/slower, odd button events (some used press, some used ondown, some had no ondown, etc). A lot of our work was…
The problem with cross-platform development in a nutshell. Still to this day writing an Android/iOS app using PCL code is a headache
After that Android's deceptively straightforward tethering feature was almost saddening...
It blows my mind that a garbage collected language without aggregate value types was the language of choice for games on these tiny phones.
I'd compare "Java as solution to everything" to the more recent "web scale" and "NoSQL" crazes, but with the backing of a PR firm instead of Internet echo chambers.
In the same vein I remember the first time I was able to use a phone to access "internet" from a computer. The "internet access" that the phone had to offer was called "WAP" and I was communicating with the phone via infrared (wireless \o/), you had to dial cabalistic symbols from the computer and to be really careful using their proxy to avoid sell-an-organ level out of plan charges. After that Android's deceptively…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have many more issues supporting multiple versions of iOS than supporting multiple versions of Android. But neither are not even close to the nightmare that was J2ME.
Another one that wasn't blessed with OEM deviations from AOSP.
Anyway, even including those cases it is still very far from J2ME days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind that this doesn't mean that they are not commercialized - modern console emulators make a lot of money on patreon(in some cases up to $80k a month) for "private builds" that can run certain games, especially newer ones, better, and online features in some cases.
Which is how it should be, IMO - the base model is available to anyone for free. If you want extra features after using the base model, then a small donation to the developers for their time is a worthwhile tradeoff.
Then you're stuck: the community member could certainly fork the project with their new feature, or maintain a patchset and forward-port to each new version of the original software, but both of those things are a ton of work.
Meanwhile, users are the ones who lose out; someone decided to build the feature and give it away for free, but users have to jump through hoops to use it.
As someone who has done a lot of open source work over the past ~20 years, I don't think anyone is entitled to find a business model in there. Sure, if you can find a way to work on your project full time but still support yourself, that's great. But often the ways people do so make for some (IMO) bad trade offs and perverse incentives.
I like the dual-licensing approach, where commercial users need to pay, but that's not workable for all projects.
In the same vein I remember the first time I was able to use a phone to access "internet" from a computer. The "internet access" that the phone had to offer was called "WAP" and I was communicating with the phone via infrared (wireless \o/), you had to dial cabalistic symbols from the computer and to be really careful using their proxy to avoid sell-an-organ level out of plan charges. After that Android's deceptively…
Ha - you should've seen early iPhone tethering. Back in those days, net neutrality wasn't a legal right yet (at least here in the Netherlands), so the carriers would push a profile to your phone that disabled tethering. The solution, of course, was to jailbreak your phone and install a tweak that turned it back on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you want a simple explanation for this story: he tried to run an old pre-iPhone mobile game on a computer. The game runs very slow on computers, which is surprising considering the performance difference between these old phones and a modern computer. The reason turned out to be that the game runs a memory cleaning command to avoid bugs arising from lack of space. Since modern computers have 10000x more memor…
> Since modern computers have 10000x more memory to clean up The understated insane part of this is that emulating a 100mhz ARM CPU with 128kb of RAM apparently takes gigabytes of RAM to accomplish. What on earth is that emulator doing?