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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#201

Post by mgkimsal »

tauntz wrote: post #163
EarthLaunch wrote: post #13

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…

Ah, it's nostalgia-a-clock. I worked on Skype for J2ME with a 3-4 person dev team. Custom UI kit, 128x128 screens, 128kb available memory and other fun limitations.. I think we re-wrote our text rendering/styling/wrapping code more times than there were actual releases of the app :) I honestly miss these times - it sparked so much creativity when one needed to achieve something in such a limited environment.

> I honestly miss these times - it sparked so much creativity when one needed to achieve something in such a limited environment.

As someone from the c64/apple][/atari generation... it was constantly amazing to see how much people could push a single device. Lots of creativity, as you say. But... we seemed to hit a wall with the whole j2me-era of "just get creative to work around things!" mindset. Because, IIRC, there were dozens of different devices that all didn't work the same way - you'd have to get really creative to get things to work in 128k, but then do it again and again and again for each target device.

There were millions of C64 units in people's hand in, say, 1986. And similar for Apple ][ units. You could be assured of a decent audience/sales/users if you ported to that platform, even if there was a lot of 'creativity' to deal with. The j2me device world always seemed a lot more fragmented to me (but maybe it wasn't?). But just saying "this runs on a java device" was different from distribution - allowing 'regular' people to get something in to a centralized store/distribution point seemed another big win for the iPhone world.

EDIT: fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#202

Post by kevinmchugh »

amelius wrote: post #194

> Before the iPhone, I worked on ... Did Carmack work on the iPhone? Or should I parse this differently?

Before the iPhone existed, there were feature phones, and Carmack wrote games for feature phones.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#204

Post by INTPenis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #169
mraza007 wrote: post #123

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

No way. There are plenty of dumb phones. I never heard the term feature phone before but when I google it I see it described as dumb phones.

I have a great Alcatel dumb phone with dual sims and NO OTHER FEATURES. :D That's exactly what you want from a dumb phone. It works just fine on any mobile network today in Sweden. It cost the equivalent of 24 USD.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#205

Post by m4rtink »

hnjst wrote: post #184

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…

I remember using infraport tethering from my Sony Ericsson 68i to my Palm Tungten T and it worked fine - good enough for ICQ, telnet and IIRC some lightweight webbrowsing. Also you could feel finally living the future. :)

Even though I never did get a Sharp Zaurus in the end, I migrated directly from Palm TX Neoo FreeRunner and to Nokia N900 and the rest is history. And I'm running Sailfis OS on my Xperia X now. :)

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#206

Post by m4rtink »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #44
ineedasername wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

I think you are right. The closest I can come to a modern example would be Darkest Dungeon (made by 2 people) and Slay the Spire/Stardew Valley (both made by single devs) however owing to your point I don’t remember their names despite reading about them at least a few times. I would recognize John Carmacks face in a crowded room not to mention obviously unlikely to ever forget his name.

Dwarf Fortress?

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#207

Post by tenebrisalietum »

blt wrote: post #134

It blows my mind that a garbage collected language without aggregate value types was the language of choice for games on these tiny phones.

Qualcomm MSM chipsets in feature phones probably all had ARM CPUs with the extensions that had the JVM acceleration instructions.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#208

Post by selfhoster11 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #153
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you miss it, just try Android, contrary to Google arguments against J2ME, the fragmentation experience is kept unchanged.

Especially with respect to Bluetooth quirks. Every single phone has a different set of bugs in its bluetooth components, and none of those sets are remotely empty. In the end, we decided we could only afford to support the 5 most popular models of the day and if you don't have that phone, then too bad for you.

Don't get me started on programming with BLE on Android. *shudders*

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#209

Post by selfhoster11 »

kelnos wrote: post #188
nexuist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that it then gives the developer weird incentives. If someone in the community decides to build the same feature that the main developer kept as a paid feature, then the main developer won't want to merge it into their version. 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 soft…

> The problem is that it then gives the developer weird incentives. If someone in the community decides to build the same feature that the main developer kept as a paid feature, then the main developer won't want to merge it into their version.

See VirtualBox, and to some extent Chrome. For VirtualBox, I'm sure that the Extension Pack could be covered with an open-source effort by the community, and in the case of Chrome, their refusal to accept *BSD patches.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#210

Post by scraft »

DistressedDrone wrote: post #16
intsunny wrote: post #9

John Carmack writes: > Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware It is amazing that in the past two decades most emulators transitioned from closed source closely guarded secrets to open sourced and often under a popular license. The preservation is unparalleled.

It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.

It surprises me that people think that it isn't possible to make money selling emulators.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dsemu.dras...

Over one million downloads, price £4.99

;)

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