TwoSpacesSG

TwoSpacesSG

@2ssg.bsky.social

He/They, 24. "Musician", "speedrunner" and "video game archivist". Gonna be trying to post about retro mobile games and occasionally about random other stuff.

26 followers16 following32 posts

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

As I found out the other day, "The Mighty Troglodytes" (the French studio behind the Legend of Spyro mobile games) made their last game in 2009, but it was not their end. At least one programmer went to work at "Playsoft" in Poland and took their tech with him. Here is the game list with TMT tech.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Shoutouts to CRV (of GDRI) for figuring out the culprit who likely passed the formats over to Playsoft, after I had initially spotted the connection between the two companies.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

I would like to get back to this account in order to keep showing off my research and other accomplishments. Don't know for how long it will last because maintaining a blog is not in my habits.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

@clydemandelin.bsky.social Really sorry to pester you about old stuff, but do you have anything about Bump'N'Jump in your archives? I'm sort of an archivist of old Java cell phone games, and to my knowledge this game is lost media. Big fan of Legends of Localization btw.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

On the topic of Mega Man feature phone games for MIDP (Western J2ME platform), I found the archived page of the publisher "8elements" that released Rockman mobile games in Asia: 1, 2, 3, Space Rescue, and the undumped localized ports of Rockman GP and Rockman Panic Fire.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Thanks to an accidental find by researcher Pirate Dragon, some never-before-seen Sega mobile games for J2ME cell phones can now be played. This includes Monkey Ball (full version), Vectorman and Virtua Cop.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

For the first time in emulation, the J2ME Nokia phone port of the Sega arcade classic Fantasy Zone can be played without graphical issues (using nightly builds of FreeJ2ME-Plus), big props to AShiningRay. This is a faithful port of the game, albeit with squished graphics.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Upon recent re-examination of #J2ME cell phone related archives, I found stuff I wasn't aware of, such as: - Doom RPG (Nokia 6280 version) unedited dump; - #Rayman Raving Rabbids, version for old Nokia phones with tiny 96x65 resolution screens (see video).

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Cancel culture is such an unfunny joke these days. If you really feel like ruining someone's life because of something they've said off-hand 4 years ago, then you're the problem.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Continuing on: Rockman 1-3 for J2ME (not Mega Man!) were released in Indonesia and were available at least in 2012. These versions aren't preserved and few people know about them, and it's not clear if 2 and 3 are based on the JP/CN or the US/EU releases. (tysm to Pirate Dragon for the tip!)

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Keitai Shojo: Ayano Spirits is a game released in Japan by G-mode for feature phones, and is part of their dating sim series. Also of note, however, is the dumped Chinese-language version released on J2ME by Joymaster. The game takes up almost 1MB of storage and has nice effects and music.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Various Japanese feature phone games got official overseas releases for Western J2ME phones (Nokia, etc.), most commonly in China, but sometimes in Southeast Asia (in English) and occasionally even in the Americas or Europe. Many of these were/are poorly documented, such as the Asian Sega releases.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Here's a J2ME game I've not heard of before - Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. Unlike other versions, this is not a shooter, but a monochrome graphical adventure where you choose between political decisions.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

The J2ME game Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 2010 Part 2 is remarkable for having over 1700 preserved versions of the game, though all but 22 of those are "dead" trial versions from the now-defunct J2ME section of the freeware app site GetJar.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

It's what you get for having so many device versions in 5 languages separately. These demos or ad-supported versions were surprisingly commonplace on J2ME, and many of them can't go in-game anymore.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Some emulation news, a while ago asdf @oldphonepreserv.bsky.social dumped the previously-lost Puzzle Bobble for Sprint (J2ME) from a Samsung SPH-A900, and today Shinovon (author of KEmulator nnmod) pushed the fixes to make it playable on his emulator. Big props to everyone involved as usual. (1/2)

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

The game itself is a simplistic implementation with now-dead online high scores and slightly ugly rescaled graphics, but it's always interesting to see overseas ports of Japanese-developed games (complete with filenames in Japanese written out with the Latin alphabet). (2/2)

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

The classic Micro Machines racing game series has a J2ME entry developed by Carbello (Sweden), which is a decent game for an early-ish release. 3 versions are preserved, but, as it sometimes happens, the best version is in Italian. The other 2 lose in performance or content. (1/2)

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

Hi folks! I'd like to revive this account and try to post regularly about Western J2ME (Java ME) game preservation. There are various blogs on this website dedicated to the highly active scene of Japanese phone preservation, but interesting things happen in relation to Western games as well.

TwoSpacesSG
@2ssg.bsky.social

There is a lot, and I mean a lot of game files to work with, and not many people to look through those; needless to say, there have been random discoveries that have taken me and some others by surprise. One of my favorites is this teeny-tiny Doom II RPG version for phones with low-res screens.

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