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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"

#281

Post by dangrossman »

atatatat wrote: post #279
dangrossman wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before smartphones and before cheap GPS, I got spoken turn-by-turn directions while driving from Tellme. 1-800-TELL-ME launched in 1999/2000. You told it your address and the destination address, and it read you the directions one at a time. E.g. after you made the first turn, you'd ask for the next one and it'd tell you. It did not need any GPS this way, it's like talking to someone sitting next to you reading the m…

And did what with it? And why?

To do the same thing Google was doing that year when they launched GOOG-411:

Using the interactive phone calls to train their speech recognition systems, so that they could eventually use what they learned to develop things like Google Assistant, Cortana, Windows Voice Recognition, etc.

Tellme was taking 2 billion calls a year when they were acquired. They had all the training data Microsoft could want to compete with Google in that area.

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

#282

Post by oooooooooooow »

soylentgraham wrote: post #217
kelnos wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I imagine the logic here would be developing a passive income to compensate for the free labor you put in in the first place, and cover whatever future free labor you might want to do.

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

#283

Post by neurostimulant »

jonny_eh wrote: post #243
neurostimulant wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have better luck running those old games under Wine or Proton.

There's a Windows version of Wine?

You might be able to do it via WSL but it's probably not worth the effort.

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

#284

Post by duped »

blakes wrote: post #238
mwcampbell wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities. The solution to that seems so obvious: make the phone speak to the driver instead. Was turn-by-turn navigation not feasible back then? Or what else am I missing?

Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it. Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again.

In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark."

Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

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

#285

Post by theli0nheart »

tylerhou wrote: post #215
someperson wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I can understand why one would want to donate if you find the product useful, but donating because it’s free doesn’t make any sense to me. Could you elaborate?

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

#286

Post by duped »

ezoe wrote: post #105

Invoking GC on every frame has different performance characteristic on old feature phone and modern PC. Reminds me of a technical document of Doom 3 BFG edition. https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_documentation/DOOM-3-BFG-Te... In 2004, it was a best practice to keep data on memory. in 2012, CPU and GPU performance was increased a lot but memory performance wasn't increased much so calculating the necessary data on dem…

This is actually a great example of something I see in the wild. The most common I've seen are lookup tables for trig functions that are only as fast or even slower than math.h.

You have to aggressively benchmark even across CPU generations to remain confident that your optimization has optimized anything.

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

#287

Post by sitharus »

Just after iPhone was released I worked for a (now defunct) company that had an automated J2ME to BREW porting tool. They modified it to work on iPhone which was why they hired me. Had a few early iPhone games released through that platform.

Of course times moved on an companies switched to native apps. I ended up leaving for an accounting startup.

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

#288

Post by nwallin »

underyx wrote: post #23
scld wrote: post #5

Not being a programmer, I never have any idea what Carmack is talking about, but I'm always enthralled.

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 thing I don't understand is that the application presumably isn't using any more or less memory than it did when it ran on a 1/10,000x computer. You're not scanning the whole RAM for memory to clean up, just the allocated memory. And on a game that was designed to use 128kB, that's presumably not very much.

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

#289

Post by bobthepanda »

duped wrote: post #284
blakes wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it. Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again. In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark." Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

At least some of the time this was more to stretch out a fare on the unsuspecting, rather than a total lack of local knowledge. Not that it makes it any better.

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

#290

Post by Talanes »

duped wrote: post #284
blakes wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it. Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again. In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark." Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

Being able to get to you and actually taking a good route are two different things though.

How did Cabbies know where to show up when called?

Or did they not? I only ever took Taxis from places I could flag them down pre-Uber.

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