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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"

#311

Post by AussieWog93 »

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.

My old boss used to be a game dev, and many people at is company used an unofficial DS emulator (I believe No$GBA but could be wrong) quite extensively for debugging/development purposes.

They even paid the developer several thousand dollars so that they would improve the debugger function.

This was all unofficial, of course - Nintendo had no idea and would not have been happy if they found out.

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

#312

Post by ksherlock »

delecti wrote: post #29
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'm curious how the UI looks to other people, because "all in once place" isn't really a complaint I can understand about the Twitter UI I'm seeing. There's buttons and stuff between tweets, but with 280 characters per tweet (140 was definitely less readable) they're not significantly more difficult to read on Twitter than they are in the paragraphs you posted.

To me it looks like : "Something went wrong. [Try again]". Clicking the try again button will never do anything. Reloading the page a few times will eventually load the tweet. Unless I'm on a mobile connection. And sometimes the web workers get screwed up and nothing will ever load until the browser is restarted.

When it does load, chances are that it only shows one tweet from a thread followed by half a dozen unrelated tweets that twitter thinks I might want to read instead.

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

#313

Post by kccqzy »

zepearl wrote: post #247
umeshunni wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Confirming #2: I live in Switzerland (low crime rate etc...) but I would not even dream of leaving my phone visible in the car. Btw. in the 90' I used to detach each-single-time that I parked the car the front panel of the car's radio to then carry it with me (leaving the storage box in front of the passenger seat open, to show that I didn't just put it in there) to discourage people from breaking into the car to ext…

And when I bought an ebike, the dealer told me to always remove the battery and carry it with me when I park the bike in public spaces.

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

#314

Post by kccqzy »

excalibur wrote: post #261
asdff wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPS navigation is 90s tech, though. I had garmin barking turns at me in the early 2000s same as siri today. In fact usually better reception than my cell phone if it was a clear day, since cell coverage is still terrible where you really need need it out in the boonies where gas stations are miles and miles apart.

True, but also your phone utilizes the same GPS signals. It's all about the maps. Your Garmin typically had maps for the whole country preloaded, your phone typically downloads them on the fly. So in the boonies your phone knows exactly where it is in terms of longitude and latitude, but hasn't a clue where anything else is.

It's not just about maps. Unlike a dedicated GPS device, your phone uses A-GPS for faster geolocation. Before A-GPS, you often need to wait a couple minutes before the device has any idea of its location or the time. Offline maps are available for both phones and non-phones, and aren't an issue at all.

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

#315

Post by sen »

andrepd wrote: post #6

I had a blast spinning up J2ME Loader on my phone (it's on f-droid) and playing games I had on my Sony Ericsson W595 back in the day :) Worms, Zombie Infection, Sims, loads of Fishlab games, a silly GTA clone... Massive nostalgia hit I expected it just to be the nostalgia, but actually those games hold up pretty well especially considering the limitations of the platform! Certainly they are a breath of fresh air comp…

Modern mobile games are an absolute joke. Sure there’s some gems, but a vast vast majority even from the “big” names are just junk. Eg the official Tetris requires a monthly subscription to not have ads between EVERY game, other big names only let you play a single level then the rest cost money for each and every additional level, etc etc.

Our “phones” are now more powerful than gaming PCs from not that long ago, and could easily play plenty of proper PC and console games from a few generations back, and yet the mobile gaming industry is basically just a lucky dip buried in a landfill.

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

#316

Post by wolverine876 »

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.

> 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.

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

#317

Post by gary_0 »

duped wrote: post #286
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.

Nowadays, most of the math code I worry about I throw into godbolt with -O3 then check the major instructions on Agner Fog. It's often immediately obvious that a modern compiler+CPU is already using a tiny number of cycles to do what I want. (One exception is hot paths that might need to be optimized by hand to use SIMD intrinsics.)

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

#318

Post by wolverine876 »

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.

> 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.

I heard these stories and would direct cabs the same way, until I realized that the cab drivers were right and I was wrong, and that the depictions of them as shady thieves who would purposely take you out of your way, or were horribly incompetent, were urban myths.

And I was being disrespectful to the drivers, to presume that and treat them that way. I don't treat other service industry people that way. And if you think about it, cab drives make more from a flag drop than a longer trip - as one cab driver said, 'people say these things to me - do you know how much I make for an extra few blocks? 50 cents? And what is my take of that?'

I learned to trust and respect the cab driver, who after all were human beings, and drove around all day long, and like most people was honest and considerate.

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

#319

Post by wolverine876 »

awaaz wrote: post #200

Oh man, do I have fond memories of developing on feature phones! Started wayyy back in 2007, and was a cofounder of a startup that made popular J2ME games available for free to people by wrapping it in our proprietary ad serving software. We launched more or less the same time that AbMob did, invented more or less the same stack (ad delivery to mobile phones), but we focussed on the product (games) whereas they focus…

> I, along with a friend, developed one of the first real-time multiplayer games called Blingster Battle, which was on top of Verizon's charts for a brief period of time! Truly groundbreaking stuff at that time..

Impressive - how did you manage to run real-time multiplayer on that technology?

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

#320

Post by astrange »

jandrese wrote: post #301
throwaway894345 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't criticizing Android , I was criticizing Android phones . I'm sure iPhone doesn't implement the protocol perfectly either, but we certainly observed fewer issues. Whether that's because our BT stack vendors did more testing with Apple devices or because Apple has fewer bugs or both, I'm not sure.

From my experience Apple’s Bluetooth stack is more stable than a typical Android stack and miles better than the Windows one. I have so many headphones that can pair with a Windows laptop exactly once, getting them to work again requires a full reset on both sides every time.

It was kind of bad until recently, it's ok now but gets a lot of custom protocol help if you buy AirPods.

There's a lot of tuning needed to avoid desense issues when your device supports 3+ wireless protocols - that's why your PC motherboard comes with an external antenna for Bluetooth and your iPhone doesn't.

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