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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"

#211

Post by cat199 »

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.

There are, "and always have been" commercial emulators for keeping old software running when the original system no longer exists (PDP, VAX, etc)

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

#212

Post by ingenieroariel »

I worked on a J2ME app that needed to access location on phones without GPS, I was in touch with the operator and got a list of cell ids with lat, lon.

With that I created a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app.

With that we developed an app to request a taxi service, but none of the taxi companies wanted it. Some of the complaints were:

1. GPRS data plans were too expensive for end users 2. No one would put an expensive Sony Ericsson touch phone on a windshield, the windshield would be broken by thieves to steal it. 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities.

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

#213

Post by EvilEy3 »

pjmlp wrote: post #192
m45t3r wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have "been blessed" with OEM deviations from AOSP (we have a big number of clients and most of them are using Android because of regional characteristics), but still we have way more issues with customers using out-dated iOS versions than users on those devices. For comparison, we have way more iOS issues than Android ones, even if Android is the vast majority of our user base (~70% of our customers). Anyway, even…

- Bluetooth issues - Camera is hit and miss, even after the renewed API - Apps randomly killed on the background - Intents that don't launch as expected - NDK debugging that cannot attach to the server running on the device - Unstable GPGPU drivers - Keyboard handling - Perfectly working code that needs to be rewritten just because Yeah so much better than J2ME.

> - Bluetooth issues

Aren't they rewriting this thing in Rust?

> - Camera is hit and miss, even after the renewed API

Give it time. CameraX is already vastly better than what we had before.

> - Apps randomly killed on the background

Up to OEMs.

> - Intents that don't launch as expected

?

> - NDK debugging that cannot attach to the server running on the device

Welp.

> - Keyboard handling

Fixed.

> - Perfectly working code that needs to be rewritten just because

?

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

#214

Post by pjmlp »

klohto wrote: post #104
omega3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened recently with Markus Persson and Jonathan Blow.

Jonathan is definitely not on the same scale as Notch. There is only a brief period where Jonathan was well known and mainly due to Indie Game: The Movie

Most people on AAA studios certainly know Jonathan, if nothing else for his contributions at GDC.

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

#215

Post by tylerhou »

someperson wrote: post #143
DistressedDrone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your comment is completely wrong. There is a cottage industry of emulation developers funding their development through Patreon. There is a huge number of emulation enthusiasts who are adults with high levels of disposable income willing to fund the development of emulators they enjoy using. Some of the larger emulators get tens thousands of dollars per month on Patreon. Checkout the following links: https://www.patr…

They are not completely wrong. Crowdfunding a product is not the same as purchasing that product because often people only decide to donate because the resulting product is free. (For example, I give $5 a month to Lichess, but I am unwilling to pay for a Chess.com subscription.)

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

#216

Post by pjmlp »

kalleboo wrote: post #126
nicetryguy wrote: post #54

GC every frame? Jesus. Gamedevs jump though hoops to avoid it.

These phones had like 1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB of RAM. And these were 3D-accelerated games running on them. A GC language was definitely the wrong choice for the platform, but J2ME was the industry standard because portable. So if you're allocating a dozen objects in a frame it's best to GC them in the same frame or you're going to lose tens of frames later. Even in modern times, for the longest time Android Java apps had la…

Refcounting has glitches as well.

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

#217

Post by soylentgraham »

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…

Or once the new feature is paid for... then release it. Someone has paid for your time (to develop the feature). They get their feature, (which they need enough to part with money), the community gets it too (whether they need it or not)

It doesnt benefit from the massive scale revenue, but if it's paid for your time...

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

#218

Post by mcphage »

rblatz wrote: post #47
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…

It’s not as recent as it seems in my mind, but Notch is a relatively well known game dev. And in the younger crowd he may be even well known than Carmack.

He hasn't really done much—or completed anything—since selling Minecraft. At one point, yes, I'd agree, but I don't think that is the case anymore.

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

#219

Post by theandrewbailey »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #154
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

The chain all in one place, such that it's readable: > Before the iPhone existed, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones": Doom RPG 1&2, Orcs&Elves 1&2, and Wolfenstein RPG. Qualcomm's native-code BREW platform had better versions, but I haven't seen any emulators and archives for it, so they may be lost at this point. The J2ME (java mobile) versions are still floating around, and can be emulate…

I wish John would move over to a proper blogging site like medium, rather than a Frankenstein string of tweets. He has enough material to gain a good following.

He used to use Facebook for these things, back when he worked there.

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

#220

Post by ascagnel_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #173
amalcon wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that Nintendo's Virtual Console emulator series has made them quite a bit of money.

Well, they stopped doing it, so perhaps not.

They don't offer emulated games as standalone purchases anymore (and, frankly, the idea that they charged repeatedly for games is insane to me) -- instead, now it's tied to the Switch Online subscription service.
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