Welcome to Retrospect!
Mobile developers have it too easy today. High-resolution screens with 5-point touch, gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to waste, cellular networks faster than T1 speeds...
.......what if it sucked like it did right after the turn of the century again?
.......what if it sucked like it did right after the turn of the century again?
what's this about?
Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition.
(affectionately known as J2ME)
That's a stripped-down Java environment that many feature phones (read: nice flip phones from a while ago and awful knockoff phones today) have support for. More specifically, we're talking about the MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile). The vision there was to make adding value-added features (think tip calculators and Mobile Banking) easier than writing them in C running directly on the OS.
A whole vibrant ecosystem sprung up! Running software? On your phone? Crazy idea. It'll never take off. These apps, called MIDlets (as in Java applets for Mobile Internet Devices) ranged from useful, to bizarre, to downright unreasonable. Phone apps were a thing before, but developers had to target specific handset lines and users couldn't generally install software that didn't carry the blessing of their carriers*. J2ME was standard, meaning an app written for one phone actually had a shot at running on another (There Were Problems With That, but it was more or less compatible-ish). A good chunk of the market was "pay your carrier an unreasonable amount of money to install an app off their app store", but there were also a bunch of sites where you could download free apps and games and just put them on your cell phone! (one of them coincidentally looked a lot like the website you're looking at now :-P) Basically every game under the sun had a port, from Plants vs. Zombies to AoE II to CoD: Modern Warfare to Elder Scrolls Oblivion. I want to keep listing these as a bit because they sound like I'm making them up, but instead I'll let you scroll through a list and laugh. A lot of them are absolutely bonkers adaptations to fit within platform limitations: What if Wolfenstein 3D was an RPG? What if Jet Set Radio was a typing game?
(affectionately known as J2ME)
That's a stripped-down Java environment that many feature phones (read: nice flip phones from a while ago and awful knockoff phones today) have support for. More specifically, we're talking about the MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile). The vision there was to make adding value-added features (think tip calculators and Mobile Banking) easier than writing them in C running directly on the OS.
A whole vibrant ecosystem sprung up! Running software? On your phone? Crazy idea. It'll never take off. These apps, called MIDlets (as in Java applets for Mobile Internet Devices) ranged from useful, to bizarre, to downright unreasonable. Phone apps were a thing before, but developers had to target specific handset lines and users couldn't generally install software that didn't carry the blessing of their carriers*. J2ME was standard, meaning an app written for one phone actually had a shot at running on another (There Were Problems With That, but it was more or less compatible-ish). A good chunk of the market was "pay your carrier an unreasonable amount of money to install an app off their app store", but there were also a bunch of sites where you could download free apps and games and just put them on your cell phone! (one of them coincidentally looked a lot like the website you're looking at now :-P) Basically every game under the sun had a port, from Plants vs. Zombies to AoE II to CoD: Modern Warfare to Elder Scrolls Oblivion. I want to keep listing these as a bit because they sound like I'm making them up, but instead I'll let you scroll through a list and laugh. A lot of them are absolutely bonkers adaptations to fit within platform limitations: What if Wolfenstein 3D was an RPG? What if Jet Set Radio was a typing game?
neat, tell me more about the platform!
it's........well..let's justr say...... limited.
wouldn't be retrospect without some stupid-ass constraint, would it?
to give you an idea of what i mean, the official DOOM port was a turn-based RPG.*
regardless, you can display graphics, receive input, do anything you can write in a slow java environment to manipulate the former in response to the latter, what more do you need?
there's also sound and (very limited) networking - the only limit is how much bad API surface you're willing to put up with!
wouldn't be retrospect without some stupid-ass constraint, would it?
to give you an idea of what i mean, the official DOOM port was a turn-based RPG.*
regardless, you can display graphics, receive input, do anything you can write in a slow java environment to manipulate the former in response to the latter, what more do you need?
there's also sound and (very limited) networking - the only limit is how much bad API surface you're willing to put up with!
enough yap. how?
idfk, not my problem, google it
what should i build?
a java MIDlet, probably.
target MIDP2!
i mean, if you write something good for BREW, or god forbid Mythroad*, i'll be impressed as hell and we'll work something out, but a MIDlet is probably your best bet.
here are some ground rules:
target MIDP2!
i mean, if you write something good for BREW, or god forbid Mythroad*, i'll be impressed as hell and we'll work something out, but a MIDlet is probably your best bet.
here are some ground rules:
- don't build slop.
we're all coming off running High Seas and i'm tired of it.
if there's obviously no effort put into the thing you make i'm just gonna reject it outright. - it doesn't have to be a game!
a game is the obvious thing to make and it's what i probably recommend, but nothing's stopping you from building something else as long as it's cool!
(please write a j2me slack client or something please please please 👉👈) - make it hold my attention for at least a few minutes please
- this should go without saying, but it's gotta be open-source!
real reverse-engineering-heads will know that anything that compiles to java bytecode is basically open-source anyway*, but post your MIDlet on github pl0x <3
why would anyone care about this platform in $current_year?
you shouldn't. next question.
what's in it for me?
ship a real j2me thing by april 7th and i'll mail you a j2me-capable phone (exact details tbd)
best one gets an ikea shark, as per usual.
best one gets an ikea shark, as per usual.
ok, actually how?
i've left some hopefully useful resources in the sidebar on the left!
a lot of the links on the topic have rotted, the Internet Archive is your friend.
a lot of the links on the topic have rotted, the Internet Archive is your friend.
