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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"

#231

Post by umeshunni »

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…

To be fair, all 3 of those are valid complaints.

#1 was true all the way till ~10 years ago when 3G became popular.

#2 is still true is most 'urban' areas. People just take their phones with them when they get out of their cars.

#3 is interesting - I think some regions had tried to ban mounting phones on the dashboard, but at this point, they must have given up

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

#232

Post by TacticalCoder »

mgkimsal wrote: post #201
tauntz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ther…

> 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.

The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point).

https://youtu.be/sWblpsLZ-O8

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

#233

Post by jazzsax »

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…

what product was this?

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

#234

Post by Deathmax »

jbjbjbjb wrote: post #223
meibo wrote: post #172

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.

Could you give examples? I can’t picture the use cases, I don’t game often.

yuzu, a Switch emulator, had introduced network play support a while ago that was gated behind Patreon subscriptions but was subsequently removed. https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-x-raptor/

IIRC, for a while cemu (a Wii U emulator) had builds with support for Breath of the Wild gated behind Patreon early access as well.

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

#235

Post by mwcampbell »

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…

> 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?

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

#236

Post by flir »

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…

"Good idea but before it's time" crashed so many mobile startups pre-iPhone.

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

#237

Post by chongli »

papercrane wrote: post #103
mukesh610 wrote: post #65

Is there any disadvantage to limiting the emulator's JVM heap size to match the original execution environment (in this case what seems to be 128k), instead of explicitly disabling GC?

Ultimately it's just as complicated as disabling explicit GC calls, and since we have a lot more RAM to use now you'll get better performance if you just let Java have a bigger heap. To be clear as well, the flag he added doesn't explicitly disable GC, it disables asking for GC explicitly, e.g. it makes "System.gc()" a no-op. The JVM will still garbage collect when it's heuristics decide it should.

Ultimately it's just as complicated as disabling explicit GC calls, and since we have a lot more RAM to use now you'll get better performance if you just let Java have a bigger heap.

Will you get better performance? Or will it end up using a large amount of memory and then having a long GC pause that causes your game to drop a frame every now and then?

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

#238

Post by blakes »

mwcampbell wrote: post #235
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…

> 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.

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

#239

Post by surfsvammel »

mwcampbell wrote: post #235
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…

> 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?

This is me guessing: This sounds like before turn-by-turn navigation was possible. If they had to approximate location via a set list of cell ids, then that doesn't give very precise location data. Also, back then, I am guessing, there where not as good map data available, especially not that would fit in a phone. I would also think that this was before synthesised speech was really possible to do on a phone.

The world is a different place today.

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

#240

Post by mwcampbell »

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.

Oh, even easier then; the phone would just have to read the address aloud. Symbian phones were able to run text-to-speech as far back as 2002; my best friend is blind and used a Nokia phone with a screen reader back then.
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