What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?

Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 533 points –

Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.

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Downloading and occasionally playing games from the flip phone era (j2me games). They seem to be mostly forgotten. They're basically the best alternative to the ad ridden, micro-transactions galore of today's android games and there's a surprisingly high amount of very high quality games.

The god of war phone game was a pretty solid metroidvania. I really liked the elder scrolls one too.

What are you emulating them on?

An emulator called j2me loader on android. The best website to download such games is dedomil.net (recommended), mobiles24.co and phoneky.com.

  • Use the 240x320 resolution and the sony erricsson k800i (recommended), the Nokia N9X, the Nokia 6xxx varients for the best graphics, quality and emulation stability on j2me loader.

  • For touchscreens use the 360x640 resolution.

Imo Dead Space was the last decently made mobile game. After that the F2P craze started and never stopped.

I’ve been playing the Dead Space mobile game on my hacked Vita. I had almost forgotten how good some mobile games used to be.

I mostly play modded games anyway. Well, i used to. Now i only play java games using j2me loader.

I went back to PS2 era games. This was the golden era imo, where games came out in a playable state and an amazing amount of content. Right now I‘m playing a completely English translated version of Monster Hunter 2 on a private server that went live about a month ago, it’s amazing.

I can't really relate since I never had a game console aside from a Chinese NES knockoff that was a some kind of keyboard with a slot in the front where you could insert a cartridge with each having 50 games or so (we had two or 3 of those cartridges). It even came with two guns to play duck hunt with.

But i can definitely understand how it could be the golden era of gaming. The enshitification started when Microsoft(who else?) made playing online a paid feature and sony seeing gullible people paying for it did it to. Then came micro-transactions and shit hit the fan from there on. Now you have to buy half-assed games that are riddled with bugs and got a big chunk of them cut of to sell as a dlc, while also having ads being thrown at your face and the best equipment blocked behind a paywall instead of gaining it in game.

Neat! I have a J2ME-capable phone but I haven't really tried playing games on it much. What are some of the best ones you've found?

The doom RPG 1 and 2 série , wolfenstein rpg, orc&elves 1 and 2 (in that order ) , stranded 1 and 2, Crash Titans, Crash Mutant Island, god of war : betrayal, the block break serie, the tower Bloxx games, the sims serie, Brick Breaker série, the nights games serie , space miner, any game by digital chocolate, glue mobile, Gameloft, EA (shudder ), THQ, SEGA..and many others.

j2me looks relatively more modern? What protocols were the old-school Nokia games like Snake written in?

I didn't know much yesterday but your comment sent me into a rabbit hole so here we go : The impressive quality of j2me games is because they ran using java through a middle layer called java 2 platform, micro edition (j2me) that allowed programmer to not care about individual platforms/phones but just use the phones capabilities through APis. This didn't really work that well because there was all kind of contraints. I vaguely remember reading John carmack rant about developing the doom rpg serie for different resolutions and the sound api being garbage.

Old Nokia phones ran on serie 20. It didn't run java games. It's successor the serie 30 had the capability to run java games but only the serie 40 made all phone run java games. The serie 60 aka SymbianOS was the real deal and kept receiving updated until it's death in 2012.

Sony ericsson phones like the k800i ran the java platform 7 (each generation of phones ran a newer version, the last bein java platform 8) directly on an Rtos (real time operating systems)

Lots of the oldest ones were binaries for really ancient embedded operating systems

How do you upload them or play them? I got space trader from the palm pilot era working on my phone but would love to get those old games working again. When I was a kid it was then and Gameboy that kept me occupied.

If you mean on your phone, download jar games from dedomil.net and upload them on your phone. Just be sure the games resolution match your screen resolution and it should work. On android use j2meloader