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Classic Atari Games for Cell Phones

Posted by michael on from the donkey-kong dept.

Peterpan writes: "ZDNet reports that Infogrames is going to port their classic Atari games to J2ME-enabled mobile devices. The Japanese still are far beyond the rest of the world regarding such devices. BTW Infogrames also wants to become Atari! I have heard that the company has established ties with Amiga Inc, so we may see Atari games for Amiga powered devices!? I would love to see Turrican on a Zaurus PDA, Rainbow Arts where are you?! :)" There's also a BBC story.

13 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Oh the irony... by CMiYC · · Score: 3

    "The Japanese still are far beyond the rest of the world regarding such devices."

    The beautiful irony in this statement is that Atari was an American company. I know that isn't what he was getting at when the comment was made, I just find it interesting. I am amazed that people do not realize that Atari always was an American company, considering the fact that Japan is where all the amazing Video Game shit happens now.

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  2. Perfect medium by Rayban · · Score: 2

    What a great idea- unfortunately it shows how far behind cellphone display tech really is. At least playing pitfall is better than the nibbles ripoff. ;)

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    æeee!
    1. Re:Perfect medium by Rayban · · Score: 3

      That's true. It's good to see Java entering the mass market. Sure it was in browsers, but noone really interacted with it full-time. :) I'd like to see more devices optimized for Java use though. Having a cell-phone as an easily reachable application target is a Good Thing.

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      æeee!
  3. Re:Is this really a good thing? by Webmonger · · Score: 2

    But Zork for cells might actually work, given decent text-to-speech software. But those screens are useless.

  4. Where is Innovation in Gaming? by _Quinn · · Score: 2

    I wouldn't normally object to retrogaming (tasty Bard's Tale I IIGS), but having seen how many old games are being re-released (Gradius III & IV on a PS2? How about Silpheed? I still have the original Sierra disks I used to play on my IIGS! For irony, how about using a PS2 to play a PS1 game that emulates the Atari 2600 so you can pretend to have an arcade machine, but without the trackball!), it seems like a lot of it's being done because nobody thinks they can make games as good in such a limited space. In other words, they know they've become eye-candy manufacturers.

    Have the genre-busters just been slipping by me?

    -_Quinn

    --
    Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
  5. Re:I wounder if... by OmegaDan · · Score: 2

    Ive got a bunch of carts, where do I plug em in ... oh wait, I have to buy them again?

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    Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
  6. Re:Do one thing, and do it well by Troed · · Score: 3
    Nah, you really don't know what you're talking about, sorry.

    Symbian - the future of cellphones. Great operating system (Epoc) and are of course J2ME (and full Java) compatible. Symbian's owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Panasonic and Psion so the fears I see in some replies here about incompatible platforms is just dead wrong.

    Take a look at that owner list for Symbian again and do the math as to how many of the cellphones sold in the world are from them.

    Free Symbian platform development kits can be downloaded from Symbian Devnet - and yes, there are sites that explain how to get them running on Linux with a little help from Wine ;)

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    it's in my head
  7. Re:Is this really a good thing? by malfunct · · Score: 2
    32mb is enough to hold all the atari 2600 games ever made like 30 times :)

    You must remember that the basic atari 2600 cartidge was 4k and the really super advanced paging schemes were limited I think at 32k or 64k. Most all games were made at 4k though with another fair sized group at 8k and 16k and like just a very few larger than that.

    I think I was able to zip all the atari games plus an emulator for dos onto a single 1.44meg floppy disk with room left over. I think I also got pkunzip on there :)

    At that point I think the cell phone memory wise is perfect medium. And come on, what other arcade game can you pay 70cents for to play as many times as you want until you need to make a phone call. Sure better than plunking quarters in the machine at a real arcade. The only thing that beats it in value is purchasing a REAL atari 2600 because you can own the system for about $20 and buy games for $1 to $3 each on auction sites and garage sales :)

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    "You can now flame me, I am full of love,"

  8. Do one thing, and do it well by Bodnar42 · · Score: 3

    I was just reading this article, and thinking about how much I would not implement portable internet gaming that way. At all. Maybe I'm a Unix weenie, but I think the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" applies here. This is how I'd do it:

    • Do not put games on a cell phone. The cell phone is a communications device, and should be nothing more. Needlessly bloating it with features will make the user find it klunky and complicated to use. Also, it'd be much harder to properly design and test a device that performs so many different functions. Nobody wants a cell phone with a cucumber slicer if it bluescreens every 5 minutes
    • When the phone is on, provide a local Bluetooth IPv6 network (look, now I'm buzz-word compliant). It could IPv6 autoregister an IP from the cell phone provider servers, and use that for the duration of the phone being on. Other devices could hook in to this wireless network and use the cell phone as a gateway to the internet (keep in mind IPv6->IPv4 and back is nearly trivial once the infrastructure is up).
    • Make the gaming device use this internet field around the cell phone. It should be about cell phone size, maybe a bit bigger for easier handling. The screen could be much larger, and less of the device would be dedicated to buttons. It would be like a cross between a Gameboy pocket (a bit too large to be uberportable) and a Sega VMU (a bit too small to be fun to use). You would probably want to throw in a color screen. Firstly, for how impressive they look, and secondly because when a screen is relatively small, you want to get as much information packed in there as possible. Clever use of color could actually improve gameplay.
    • For the love of god, don't use Java. Java has it's place, but not in portable gaming devices, were every cycle counts. Make a standard gaming system specification everyone could live with. I'd look in to something resembling a fast m68k compatible processor, 256KB of RAM with impressive memory bandwidth, and a custom 2D chip with respectable on-board 2D rasterization abilities. Any game worth playing could be implemented on a system like that (it'd end up being slightly more powerful than a SNES), and the hardware could probably be mostly implemented on a single chip

    Then again, I'd probably be one of the only people in the known world that would enjoy playing Chu Chu Rocket Embedded infinitely more because I knew the technology was cleanly implemented.

    -Ryan
  9. Next on FOX: When Good Technologies Go Bad by The+Night+Watchman · · Score: 3

    In a similar story, modern dishwashers are now being equipped with GPS receivers so you never get lost in your kitchen! Isn't this great? Atari games on our cell phones. Is it just me, or is this whole cell phone thing gotten completely out of hand? Now, personally, I think cell phones are great. It's indispensible if I ever get stranded on the side of the road, or get lost somewhere, or if I just really need to get in touch with someone and can't be tied to a regular telephone.

    But now they're coming with web browsers, email clients, instant messaging tools... That one really made me laugh. I once saw a guy using IM on his cell phone. I'm there thinking, "You're on a cell phone, dude... just call the guy." It might be different if the thing had a keyboard. Then you might be able to type out a message in a reasonable amount of time. I just think that we're trying to put applications which, in theory, are very useful to have in a portable device, into the perfectly wrong kind of medium

    Okay, so this isn't really about Atari for me, it's just about the whole issue of the technology getting bloated and companies trying to give these devices applications which are clearly impractical for them. Speaking of which, I love how dialup ISPs are still making money, even though the Internet has really, for the most part, outgrown narrowband access.

    I'm not really sure what exactly it was that I was getting at with this, but seeing good technology get bloated like this just makes me queasy. But that, of course, is just my own opinion.

    /* Steve */

    --
    "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
    1. Re:Next on FOX: When Good Technologies Go Bad by Script0r · · Score: 3

      I think you need to stop thinking of a cell phone as just a phone and start thinking of it as more of a pda, like a palm pilot that you can make phone calls on.

  10. Things are moving to fast for me by perlchimp · · Score: 3

    First, I learn how to drive with Atari Indy 500. 20 years later people tell me not to drive while using a cell phone. Now the two are combined. Who do I listen to in this fast paced crazy world?

  11. Whoo hoo! by BIGJIMSLATE · · Score: 2

    Nothing like a game of Pitfall to screw up my driving (in a Firestone-equipped Explorer nonetheless) even more than it already is.

    "Watch out for that gator Pitfall Harry!"
    *CRASH*

    Then again, I'll more likely be rear-ended by someone trying to figure out the object of Pac-Man or Pong...