@coolboymew I don't know if they were Java programs. I don't know Apple's relationship with Java, but I bet they used something proprietary or their Objective-C language. From what I've heard, the games were all zip files with a different extension.

But mobile games, PDA games, etc from the pre-smartphone era desperately need to be preserved. It feels like people forgot that those games existed.

@xianc78 A few are. I know the Hyperspace Delivery Boy game was easier to find the PDA ver than the PC ver at some point

@coolboymew PDA games might be easier to find, but feature phone games is probably a different story. Most of them didn't have Wi-Fi and carriers would charge you for even browsing their catalog, so most people didn't bothered to check them out, unless you can side-load Java applications via USB or PC removable storage.

@xianc78 @coolboymew you can sideload

@pawlicker @coolboymew Not all of them. The only feature phone I had couldn't sideload.

@xianc78 @coolboymew the Motorola ones can be for sure same with winmo phones with a j2me runtime.

@pawlicker @coolboymew I had a Samsung Brightside. I don't think it was Java based.

oh no not brew. There were more Java and I-Mode games tbh, the latter in Japan and the former worldwide.

@pawlicker @coolboymew I didn't even know what Brew was when I still used that phone. Not like I care about mobile games anyway.

It seems like fangames made more of an effort on those phones. There was a fan-remake of Zelda 1 using graphics from Minish Cap being developed for Java phones (I played it on an emulator), but the developer quit after having a daughter.

BREW was a CDMA thing, while GSM phones used J2ME and the like. Unlike Java it also wasn't "write once run anywhere" which worked well in phones because of the variety of CPUs and chipsets.

@xianc78 @coolboymew there's efforts underway from a palmos emu or two to j2me emus to most notably the whole i-mode effort.