Classic Atari Games for Cell Phones

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.

Comments

Oh the irony...

[CMiYC]

"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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Re:Perfect medium

[Rayban]

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.

Re:Do one thing, and do it well

[Troed]

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 ;)

Do one thing, and do it well

[Bodnar42]

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

Next on FOX: When Good Technologies Go Bad

[The Night Watchman]

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 */

Re:Next on FOX: When Good Technologies Go Bad

[Script0r]

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.

Things are moving to fast for me

[perlchimp]

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?