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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"

#381

Post by bombcar »

evgen wrote: post #356
wolverine876 wrote: post #316

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. In what city? London cab drivers famously were (are?) required to pass a memorization test, but in American cities I've had many cab drivers who didn't know their way around. They've been generally better than Lyft/Uber drivers.

In just about every city a cab driver was expected to know where they were going. For more obscure addresses they may have asked for major cross streets or similar, but it was generally assumed that the driver knew where he was going (which led to the inevitable problem when he didn't or when the passenger was not precise in their description of the destination.) You would also always find a Thomas' guide somewhere i…

People knew this too - and so navigating by landmarks was much more common.

Some cities are setup so that with most addresses you can pinpoint almost exactly where it is in the city. Seattle’s a good example of this.

Also if you think of most taxi trips they will either be to a major location (hotel, airport, restaurant) or to a place personally known by the rider (house, work).

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

#382

Post by alisonkisk »

DistressedDrone wrote: post #262
scraft wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

You got me there! It shows the kind of market that can emerge when piracy is less practical than purchasing the software. My point still stands though for emulators on PC where I believe software piracy remains popular.

PC software has a market too.

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

#383

Post by meheleventyone »

ineedasername wrote: post #379
meheleventyone wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fame in gaming has largely moved into “content creators”. The most famous game developers are almost certainly YouTubers first and game developers second. There are some fairly big channels now that produce memey content about making games in nearly exactly the same way as people make memey content about Minecraft or Fortnite. People like danidev: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIabPXjvT5BVTxRDPCBBOOQ

I think you may have a point. I don't play Fortnite, but I know who Ninja is, and casual observers of the gaming world pretty much know his name regardless of playing fortnite. (Though he's not a game dev). It is an interesting trend that players can now become more famous for playing a game than the people that create the game. However I think that's only possible with the advent of user-created content: Minecraft g…

It’s not that unusual that players get famous for playing games rather than developers. Games are much more active way of engaging with media and playing the game is a far more common experience than making it.

Streaming and gaming personalities both pre-date Minecraft but for sure it’s had a massive cultural impact. Particularly in terms of the growth of an audience through all the kids participating.

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

#384

Post by an_opabinia »

tylerc230 wrote: post #344
ayyy wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, "second screen" was the term I heard used for those types of experience. The only prominent example I can think of these days is kahoot, which is only sort of the same idea.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the phrase "second screen". It was going to be big thing until people realized that no one wanted to look at 2 screens at once.

Nobody could have anticipated that YouTube poop would be more compelling than professionally produced television.

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

#385

Post by bserge »

Rerarom wrote: post #346
bserge wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPRS was a godsend as it brought the always-connected, pay-for-data usage that we all know nowadays. The precursor, HSCSD, was ridiculously expensive because you paid by the minute. If my memory is correct, there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM (well, I used something before I had a phone that supported HSCSD), which was interesting, but quite useless at the time. Also, #3 makes little sense seeing as there were alrea…

> there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM Yeah, it was called CSD. HSCSD was high-speed CSD.

Right, a whole 9.6 kbit/s, HSCSD was a major upgrade at 56 kbit/s :D

The technology has come so far, it's pretty incredible.

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

#386

Post by duped »

Talanes wrote: post #290
duped wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calling a cab resulted in a cabbie showing up maybe 20% of the time. You would hail cabbies in the street.

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

#387

Post by astrange »

kaba0 wrote: post #374
astrange wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the options for sharing an object between threads then? It works fine, it’s just not done that often. (Specifically contended refcount changing isn’t done, which is why having fast uncontended atomic helps.) Transferring between threads happens and just works. ObjC has explicit weak pointers and ways to move destructors to another thread and it all works. Though you could use C# or JavaScript in your app,…

I don’t get your point. Of course refcounting is a possible and working solution, but it’s not an accident that Java, JS, and C#, languages with the best GCs, doesn’t use it.

Yes, C# is the best language to write a phone OS in if you want to go out of business.

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

#388

Post by teach »

ayyy wrote: post #339
tylerc230 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company that allowed you to play along with jeopardy on your brew/Jme device in real time as you watch the show live on tv. You could compete with your friends in real time, leaderboards, chat etc. The company eventually went under but I can’t help but think if it had been ported to iOS when it came out it would have been a hit. I’ve still never seen any technology like it.

At the time, "second screen" was the term I heard used for those types of experience. The only prominent example I can think of these days is kahoot, which is only sort of the same idea.

The Jackbox series of party games also does this very well.

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

#389

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

They had a limited amount of memory and accessing it was probably fast, comparatively speaking. So it was a better fit for those devices than it is for our modern ones.

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

#390

Post by Nexxxeh »

spoppy wrote: post #378
ingenieroariel wrote: post #212

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 pl…

Pre-iPhone I used my Symbian phone as the GPS system in my car, using software called Route 66 and a bluetooth based GPS receiver. The map data was all stored on an MMC card so it didn't need any GPRS data. I used both a Nokia 6600 and then a 6680 with the same software. https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php Only the bluetooth GPS receiver had to be kept in the windscreen, and both parts were smal…

TomTom on my Orange-branded HTC Windows phone/palmtop for me.

Unrelated obviously, but as someone who was surprisingly poor for an owner of such a phone in those days (it was on my mum's phone contract and we had to fight and haggle to get it), satnav software piracy was rampant back in the day.

I think there's still a Bluetooth GPS receiver somewhere in my old room at my folks place...

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