Potential HUGE source of free Java games / apps
This post might go on a bit; apologies to the impatient... ;)
I recently got my hands on a SE T610 and started thinking about the kind of stuff that could be run on the phone... After having a look around I wasn't really inspired by the commercial stuff and there seems to be hardly any decent homebrew stuff either, so I was at a bit of a loss as to how useful Java on the phone actually was. Those commercial games and apps are fine, but you've got to pay for them and most aren't worth the few pounds they ask for anyway.
It was at this point I hit on an idea.... ^_^
For the past few years I lived in Japan where technology is way ahead of most (all?) other countries and they've had Java on their phones for YEARS (well, say 2 or 3 at this point). I wondered if all those homebrew apps that people over there have making, would work on my humble T610. Research...
3 main mobile phone companies / Java systems:
NTT (i-mode, i-appli, i-Java etc)
Vodafone, formerly J-Phone (J-appli, V-appli)
AU (EZ-appli (JAVA))
It wasn't too hard to browse around and find some homebrew stuff; there's tonnes of it. Lots of commercial stuff too (Metal Gear Solid 2 on your phone? No problem!).
The Test: Download a few test apps in each format, have a look at it on the PC and see if a renamed/easily altered file will run on the T610.
Things to bear in mind:
I should point out that this was just a quick test and I'm not a programmer by trade. ^_^ Current Japanese phones have a 240x320 QVGA screen thats bigger than any phone here so some apps won't fit on the screen even tho they do run. The phones are also generally faster and have (usually) more buttons.
1. i-appli - Files in a '.jam' format which appears to just be a ranamed '.jar'. However, they don't upload to the T610; 'Invalid application'. It looks that with a bit of tweaking, they could be made to work.
2. J-appli - Files only seemed to be available thru the 'J-Sky' WAP-style cHTML webpages and thus I couldn't get any. Yet. ^_^
3. EZ-appli - The files arrive in '.kjx' format. Rename to '.jar'. Currently looking at a 50% success for files that are within the T610's spec. An example - download this, rename to '.jar' and run it...
Test Platform Game
Or try this:
Odd Minesweeper Game
Odd Minesweeper Game - For big screened devices
Not bad, considering it opens up a whole new resource of software! The index page I got the above two from is here:
Homebrew EZ-Appli
You can see the game categories listed (Babelfish might be of use here); to get the '.kjx' files you'll need to extract the links from the HTML of the page as they aren't linked in a PC friendly format. View the source of the following page and grab the files.
http://www1.clickdirect.jp/~boyno1da/eshoot2.shtml
More testing is needed and I hope some of the more Java-adept of you will have a deeper look at the other formats to see if any can be tweaked. Right, time to post this and do a bit more testing.... Hope someone finds this of some use!
