Cell Phone emulation

**BlackAura** · October 14th, 2004, 22:58

There's more than that, the most obvious being Bleemcast. Smeg was written originally as a PC-based emulator / debugger, but ended up as a Dreamcast-based emulator. DreamSpec was written from scratch, as was DC64. I'm pretty sure that Gleam! was written from scratch as well. Admittedly, two of those used Katana, and one was a commercial app, but they're still written for the Dreamcast. Whack-a-mole was too, and I think there are a couple of others.

However, notice that most of those have been surpassed by a port of a PC emulator? That's generally because the PC emulator is much, much older than the from-scratch emulator it replaced.

One other anomaly is Genesis Plus / DC. Although a port, much of it has been rewritten, and it makes better use of the Dreamcast hardware than most emulators. However, if we'd had to do it from scratch, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is right now.

**curt_grymala** · October 15th, 2004, 12:29

I don't know about all types of cellphones, but I was under the impression that a lot of them used Flash and Java as the languages for the games. I know for a fact that the games on my Motorola phone are Java-based. It may be an offshoot of the original Java language, but it's still based out of it.

Therefore, if we're talking about the Java-powered apps for cellphones, then we run into the same problems we have always run into - very few (if any) decent open-source JVM's.

If we're talking about Flash-powered apps for cellphones, there may be a way to utilize scherzo's FlashDC in order to run those games.

**Cereal** · October 15th, 2004, 14:01

I'm guessing they mostly use java. It's so hard to believe there isnt a java emulator. And I dont think its only java because you can download YS6 but I have no clue how to use it on pc. Maybe someone should look into it.

**Saoshyant** · October 15th, 2004, 18:02

Cell phone games also use a language called Symbiam if I am not wrong (I'm no expert on that subject).

I really would see no problem with pc ports as one can see they can be improved, but all those projects you mentioned BlackAura they are few and usually unfinished. I believe DC coders should start more projects from scratch _and_ finish them. Please don't lose the enthusiasm in the middle. Then again this is just my opinion, might not even be real according to some weird philosophy guys...

***quzar*** · October 15th, 2004, 19:25

symbian isnt a language, its the OS that they use.

Starting stuff from scratch is insanely harder than porting things, even if you rewrite most of it.

**BlackAura** · October 15th, 2004, 22:51

Most mobile phones are Java based. However, the problem in running them isn't the lack of a good open-source Java runtime. It's the lack of a complete set of the Java class libraries, especailly if you're trying to run stuff intended for J2ME (the version of Java that mobiles use). There are a number of good JVMs we could port, and even a simple interpreter would do the trick, but porting all the class libraries could take forever, especially considering that there isn't a full open source set of PCs yet...

That said, it's more likely to work thak writing a phone emulator. For one, you'd have to actually get a complete copy of the phone's firmware (including the Java runtime) to be able to run an emulator.

Most of those projects stopped being developed because someone else ported something from the PC, and the port turned out a lot better that the from-scratch version, because it was a lot more mature. Genesis Plus is three or four years old, even though the Dreamcast version is nothing like that old.