Nokia N8 Emulator
Ozie Melzer
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, 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.
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 to the Sony Ericsson versions of their J2ME games.
Currently, the Android-exclusive J2ME Loader is able to run most of the 2D and 3D (including Mascot Capsule 3D) J2ME games. On desktops, KEmulator nnmod should suffice for most games (and FreeJ2ME is also a solid option), 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.
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.
However, while gaining support through GBA/PS1 ports (including the only English version of the JP-only Xanadu series until 2016) and a few original exclusives, the thing suffered from huge design flaws, from the button layout to the display and cell phone functionality. Furthermore, as a derivative of business-oriented devices, it didn't even have any dedicated video or sound hardware, so not unlike many of the PC MS-DOS games, the main CPU had to take care of it, severely limiting its full potential.
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.
There however exists an SDK for the Nokia 3410, an enhanced variant of the infamous 3310 with a higher-resolution screen and support for MIDP applications. A fixed rip of the simulator can be downloaded on the Internet Archive, though it may have some issues especially on later Windows versions.
ExEn was a freeware solution developed by French company In-Fusio around 2000 and later the company re-developed the ExEn V2 engine in 2002, which further improved the speed and expressiveness of mobile. It was first 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).
The API is based on Java and is very similar to J2ME, but is optimized for game development and deployment instead. Even the programming style is almost the same. Its significance is very similar to the Mophun platform. The ExEn API has various gaming specific classes that are absent from J2ME. ExEn was the first mass market downloadable game engine to be made available in Europe. It achieved relative success and widespread hardware support in Europe, and was also used in China. It's not as widely distributed though, and according to In-Fusio's website, it isn't available on Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or Motorola handsets.
Palm launched webOS, then called Palm webOS, in January 2009 as the successor to Palm OS. The first webOS device was the original Palm Pre, released by Sprint in June 2009. In April 2010, HP acquired Palm, then in 2013 LG acquired them to make webOS for TV, Smartwatch, and Smartfridge. For LG's webOS see Smart TV Emulators.
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.
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 MAUI Runtime Environment. 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.
DeNa (Mobage), Namco (Tales of Mobile) and Level-5 (RoiD) set up Steam-like game distribution portals specific to some cell-phone models yet i-mode based. The different names are to confuse dirty gaijin, probably.
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.
In 2006 an Open Application Player (Japanese: オープンアプリプレイヤー) feature was added allowing to run MIDP 2.0 Java apps on the BREW devices, which were often denominated as オープンアプリ. It lacks support for the original proprietary extensions of ezplus. On 2011, Open Application Player was updated and renamed to "EZ-appli (J)" along EZ-appli (BREW) which became "EZ-appli (B)"
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".
SKT (Sunkyong Telecom) provided two development platforms: GVM and SK-VM. GVM based on Mobile C, and SK-VM based on Java. SK-VM was a Java-based development platform, but the execution speed was slower than GVM due to the nature of Java. SK-VM is a J2ME (Java 2 Micro Eidtion) Java execution environment developed
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
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