Before the smartphones we know today were staples of mainstream culture, mobile phones, and their technology were pretty rudimentary and often relied on apps made in Java seeing as the language was designed to be portable (though Windows Mobile and Symbian were also somewhat popular as proto-smartphone platforms of choice). This didn't keep games from being developed for these platforms. Casual simplistic games and rip-offs of retro franchises thrived, but it attracted some genuinely fun games that forever remained obscure, such as those from Gameloft.
The situation is quite different in Japan where mobile hardware was much more developed, only loosely Java-based, and major video game developers were much more invested in creating unique and high-quality content that's most obscure and unpreserved, let alone emulated, today. Those are the very different Galapagos mobile phones (like NTT DoCoMo i-mode, DeNa, RoID...). Some of these games got ported to the inferior Western hardware but these are in the tiny minority.
Mre Mobile Games Free Vxp
A free cross-platform language capable of working in devices with highly reduced capabilities. It was basically Java stripped down to the bare essentials.While originally not intended for games (until its more advanced game-oriented API came), it became the de facto market standard for cell phone gaming - due in no small part to the SDK being free and without licensing costs.
Mascot Capsule 3D is a proprietary 3D graphics engine developed by Hi Corporation. It was mostly used in Japanese cellphone devices, but it also made it overseas featured in many Sony Ericsson devices. Many developers made use of this tech to bring higher quality 3D graphics on the Sony Ericsson version of their J2ME games.
Currently, the Android-exclusive J2ME Loader is able to run most of the 2D and 3D J2ME games with the Mascot Capsule 3D exclusive games. On desktops KEmulator and FreeJ2ME should suffice for most games, but there's a minority of games making use of obscure vendor-specific APIs supported only on their respective SDK tools. Given the scarcity of such tools, this list aims to comprehensively list the available ones for convenience.
N-Gage is a mobile phone and a handheld game device developed and designed by Nokia Corporation,announced on 4 November 2002 and released on 7 October 2003. 'N-Gage QD' introduced in 2004 as a redesign of the original "N-Gage Classic", fixing widely criticized issues and design problems. 'N-Gage' was discontinued in February 2006, with Nokia moving its gaming capabilities onto selected Series 60 smartphones. 'N-Gage 2.0' was announced in 2007.
Originally a joint Nintendo-Nokia cellphone handheld hybrid project slated for 2005, Nintendo backed away from the project (and its plans for NES/Game Boy ports for mobile were repurposed for their Virtual Engine project). Nokia continued the project on their own anyways and released N-Gage on October 7, 2003, for $299 as the most powerful handheld of its time, that is up until the DS and PSP came along and ended Nokia's hopes at dominating the handheld gaming market. It had an ARM920T CPU at 104 MHz.
A freeware solution developed by In-Fusio (French) around 2000. The company re-developed the ExEn V2 engine in 2002, which further improved the speed and expressiveness of mobile. It was first a Java-based game engine entirely dedicated to mobile devices itself as an alternative to the limitations of J2ME's game development (offering missing feautures like sprite zooming, parallax scrolling, rotations).
Being the turnkey solutions firm that they are known for, as their chips are used on millions and millions of el-cheapo "Shanzhai" devices all over the world (especially counterfeit Nokias and Goophones among other things), Mediatek has also come up with their own mobile platform and API known as the Mediatek Runtime Environment, aka MAUI. It is targeted for so-called "smart" feature phones, i.e. those that offer similar functionality to standard mobile operating systems like Android, but are watered down for entry-level users. Games and applications for this platform are in .VXP format and other applications appear to be available on the usual WAP sites.
Mophun is an even more hardware-efficient free European-centric mobile gaming solution developed by Swedish company Synergenix Interactive AB. There are two versions of Mophun, 2D for low-end (Sony Ericsson T2xx, T3xx and T6xx series) and 3D for high-end handsets (Symbian S60 and UIQ3 phones), and it's often used to provide embedded (pre-installed) games on mobile phone handsets.
Japanese mobile manufacturer NTT DoCoMo released DoJa (DoCoMo's Java) as part of their i-mode set of standards for mobile telephony. It is based on Java ME CLDC, but not MIDP. The profile received several updates, being later renamed to "Star". It was used on DoCoMo's mova and FOMA series of mobile phones, being first featured on the mova 503i from 2001.
While i-mode phones were made available in a limited fashion in Europe, the game apps weren't exported, the i-mode specific features were mainly used for enhancing web pages for mobile browsers and even the Java API is the different more limited "Overseas Edition". The main reason behind this was the fierce push back by Nokia and other western mobile hardware manufacturers refusing to support the DoJa software standard until very late.
Japanese carrier KDDI/Au released ezplus as part of their EZweb set of standards for mobile telephony. It is based on Java ME extended with proprietary APIs. The first device supporting it was released on 2001 (Hitachi C451H).ezplus was later renamed to "EZ-appli (Java)" (Japanese : "EZアプリ (Java)") and gradually replaced with a BREW-based solution called "EZ-appli (BREW)" until 2004 when the last ezplus device was released.
Japanese service provider 'J-PHONE' released the J-SKY platform as part of their set of standards for mobile telephony. It was based on J2ME and MIDP extended with several proprietary 3D/sound/gfx APIs called JSCL.J-PHONE had been purchased by Vodafone on 2001, which two years later took over the original branding renaming the carrier to Vodafone KK. The J-SKY technology became then known as "Vodafone Live!" and it was extended with the VSCL set of APIs. On 2006, Vodafone KK was purchased by SoftBank Group, getting this technology rebranded again as "Yahoo! Keitai".
GVM (General Virtual Machine): GVM1X, GVM2XMobile platform created based on Mobile C (modified to fit the mobile environment, such as reduction of pointer and union functions in the existing C language) developed by Shinji Soft.
GNEX (General & Next Multimedia Player): GVM3XA mobile platform that eliminates the limitations of the existing GVM and further strengthens functions such as file system, network, and graphics. GNEX is an upgraded version of GVM, and has the advantage of having few capacity restrictions and fast speed, but its penetration has fallen significantly compared to GVM. Therefore, when releasing a GNEX version of a game, we developed both the GVM version and the GNEX version to support phones that do not support GNEX
WIPI a national middleware platform standard in South Korea. Almost all cellphone games released in South Korea from 2002 to 2009 were developed as WIPI.SKT (GNEX, SKVM), KTF (BREW), LGT (MIDP-JAVA), etc. are these, and they are currently converting to an integrated platform called WIPI. After conversion to an integrated platform called WIPI, mobile games have higher quality graphics and game ability than before.
MiniJ is a lightweight mobile platform developed by Hangzhou Sky Network Technology Co., Ltd. and it's widespread in China (and in some other countries). It has excellent overall performance and could run applications and games smoothly with very limited hardware resources. MiniJ applications are written in C programming language.
A mobile development platform by Qualcomm, originally intended for CDMA handsets such as those sold by Verizon. Unlike Java ME, applications and games for BREW use native code as opposed to running in a virtual machine in the case of Java ME. Also, BREW development has a higher barrier to entry due to stringent certification requirements, which led it to be significantly less popular than Java ME even in markets where CDMA has a significant market share, such as in North America. To top it all off, downloaded BREW apps are tied to an individual handset via a digital signature, making piracy or sideloading difficult; it is however possible to unlock certain BREW-enabled CDMA phones to run backups and pirated apps, though downloads for BREW apps and games are rare and hard to find compared to Java ME.
Zeebo is a brazilian video game console and online distribution platform developed and released with developing markets in mind, also runs on BREW. Dumps of the Zeebo and its games exist, and gameplay footage of them have been uploaded on YouTube.
Earlier black & white cellphone games (both in Japan and worldwide) didn't get as much love either when it comes to emulation and preservation of game binaries. There were, however, recreations of Snake and Space Impact for Nokia phones on their website at one time, along with remakes of the aforementioned games for Android and iOS. There are several Nokia phone models with MAME support, though they are preliminary at best with most models displaying a "CONTACT SERVICE" error if not a white screen.
Released in 2000 by Microsoft as their first mobile OS, originally called "Pocket PC" and made to run on PDA's, the name changed to Windows Mobile when the PDA market began to shrink. WM was initially based on Windows CE before evolving into something unique. It was mainly designed for business users, so it didn't have a lot of games for it.
Bada (바다) is a mobile operating system developed by Samsung Electronics for devices such as mid- to high-end smartphones and tablet computers. The name is derived from "바다 (bada)", meaning "ocean" or "sea" in Korean. All phones running Bada were branded with the name Wave, unlike Samsung's Android devices which are branded as Galaxy. 2ff7e9595c
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