Who Needs an ngage when you have a 3650?

[toddst]

I just thought that some of you might be interested to know that the ngage has already been cracked and most of the games seem like they can be played on a Nokia 3650.

If you are curious, just do a google search. Hint: one of the keywords is blz. No free illegal handouts here...

-Todd

[kai123]

Well that sucks for the nokia. My question is who wants to pirate ngage games? :?

[jonjandran]

And the 3650 is $250.00 , So how exactly is that better than an NGAGE ?

OH YEA IT'S A MUCH COOLER LOOKING PHONE, AND IT'S NOT A TACO. LOL

Although I do wonder how easy it would be to play the games with the 3650 keypad ?

[toddst]

Actually, the 3650 can be a $100 phone if you call your provider and complain that you have been with them for ___ years and that you are really upset that only new members can afford to get a quality cell phone...It only took me 1 minute of politely complaining...

-Todd

[Nynaeve]

And the 3650 is $250.00 , So how exactly is that better than an NGAGE ?

OH YEA IT'S A MUCH COOLER LOOKING PHONE, AND IT'S NOT A TACO. LOL

Although I do wonder how easy it would be to play the games with the 3650 keypad ?

ACtually, I got mine for FREE. Amazon.com had them for 150 with a 150 rebate. I have the GoBoy loaded up on it, and play Zelda on the way to work.... :) And Monopoly for the times I'm stuck waiting with the kids, we can all play!

I haven't tried to get the NGage games yet...but I saw this yesterday, that some of the games are now "available"... x_x

[jonjandran]

I was talking about the phone by itself without a Cellular 12 month plan. :roll:

[Slipdeath]

is this is the one that kinda looks like the ngage??

[Nynaeve]

http://www.howardforums.com/images/avatars/nokia3650-2.gif

that's my phone. :)

edit: phone stats (http://www.symbian.com/phones/nokia_3650_3600.html)

[Rev. Link]

I heard about this just a bit ago. I should have guessed someone here would have a thread about it already. :)

I hope this means we'll be seeing N-Gages in the $30 bargain bin sooner than ever!

[Sotenga]

Lemme just repeat what I said on a duplicate thread:

That sucks for Nokia. This is even worse than having all existing copies being eaten by cows. LOL

Seriously, this is flagrant piracy. D4MN 1337 @$$ H4XX0rz... :angry:

I may get an N-Gage in the future. It's not likely, but the least I could do is offer a bleeding company some gauze, by which I mean money.

[Rev. Link]

Well, I was only ever interested in the system for collection purposes only, so I'd love to see it drop like a stone in price.

[bensenvill]

I debated about posting this earlier but it was on slashdot so I figured everyone here saw it

but heres a link to the story it reference for those that missed it

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/8422

I am a proud owner of a 3650, got it week it came out. Anyone know if the nguage games are written in jave?? just curious


~Tj

[chadtower]

I am a proud owner of a 3650, got it week it came out. Anyone know if the nguage games are written in jave?? just curious
~Tj

I don't know anything about the ngage or the 3650, but I do know that any company that tried to write games for small devices in java would be more successful selling pizzas with fecal toppings. Java is very overhead intensive.

[Raccoon Lad]

Sadly, pretty much ALL cell phone games are written in Java. Though I believe you can program in C++ for the N-Gage as well.

[chadtower]

Sadly, pretty much ALL cell phone games are written in Java. Though I believe you can program in C++ for the N-Gage as well.

Dude, so you're telling me those little things are running a windows kernel AND the JVM? Christ, no wonder they suck.

[Oobgarm]

http://www.gamespot.com/all/news/news_6083174.html

Nokia is N-raged. LOL

[Nynaeve]

Sadly, pretty much ALL cell phone games are written in Java. Though I believe you can program in C++ for the N-Gage as well.

Dude, so you're telling me those little things are running a windows kernel AND the JVM? Christ, no wonder they suck.

LOL! They're not THAT bad...at least if you look at it like I do, a cell phone with bonuses. The 3650 runs the Symbian OS (http://www.symbian.com). I just have to find a bigger memory card for mine, or take off some of the photos/videos I have recorded and saved to make room for more games. *grin*

At EB yesterday, one of the saleswomen was "off duty" and shopping there with 2 friends...I recognized her, and I had to laugh when one of her friends played with the NGage on display there, and she does "Don't even BOTHER, those things are a HUGE ripoff..." Apparently NOT a Nokia fan! ;^>

[chadtower]

What I can't figure out is why they would do it in Java with the obvious overhead of the interpreter (oh, I'm sorry, "virtual machine"). I mean, can't they hire competent programmers to do it in at least a true compiled language?

[SpasticFuctard]

Well, for one, you can build software for a wide array of phones/devices.

But that said, I expect that a lot of the games are in fact written in C++(using the CodeWarrior embedded plugins), in whatever stripped down tiny little space these suckers afford you. JVMs for phones are notoriously limiting in what you can and cant do with the graphics packages and the draw routines are slow and clunky even by Java standards.

SF - Java Engineer for Wireless devices 3 years in the making.

[chadtower]

It really is a shame companies don't bother writing more of their basic packages in assembly anymore... I suppose it would take too long now that games are so much more elaborate than they used to be. Think of the speed advantage, though, over having that stupid JVM to deal with.

[Nynaeve]

The applications you can get are either java or .sis...the .sis being the Symbian OS I am assuming?

The .sis files have to be downloaded to your phone via IR, bluetooth or by using a memory card reader.

The java apps can be sent directly to your phone "over the air" (ie. you can email your phone with the file).

Maybe it's the transportability?

[chadtower]

The applications you can get are either java or .sis...the .sis being the Symbian OS I am assuming?

The .sis files have to be downloaded to your phone via IR, bluetooth or by using a memory card reader.

The java apps can be sent directly to your phone "over the air" (ie. you can email your phone with the file).

Maybe it's the transportability?

I can't see transportability having anything to do with it. The only reason one would be transportable and the other not is because of the protocols they're using to do it. Data is data and if you can move one type of data via a mechanism you can move any type of data. Whether or not the recipient's protocol can interpret that data is another story, but if they wanted to, they could transport the .sis stuff via OTA (it IS a phone connection) too. I don't know specifically what a .sis is but really all that is is the filename anyway... since it's dependent on a three letter extention in the filename it is probably running some type of variant on the windows registry.

[Nynaeve]

The applications you can get are either java or .sis...the .sis being the Symbian OS I am assuming?

The .sis files have to be downloaded to your phone via IR, bluetooth or by using a memory card reader.

The java apps can be sent directly to your phone "over the air" (ie. you can email your phone with the file).

Maybe it's the transportability?

I can't see transportability having anything to do with it. The only reason one would be transportable and the other not is because of the protocols they're using to do it. Data is data and if you can move one type of data via a mechanism you can move any type of data. Whether or not the recipient's protocol can interpret that data is another story, but if they wanted to, they could transport the .sis stuff via OTA (it IS a phone connection) too. I don't know specifically what a .sis is but really all that is is the filename anyway... since it's dependent on a three letter extention in the filename it is probably running some type of variant on the windows registry.

psst...Chad...you're making me swoon with all your technobabble...

:kiss:

*grin* I don't know why they chose this...but I do know that the java based stuff really does bog the phone down, whereas the .sis Symbian stuff is quick to load up. The phone offers the ability to multi-task, like Windows, however it also offers the ability to HANG ALOT, like Windows...but I still love it and don't see myself outgrowing it for a bit.

Now to find some more GBA games to add to my little collection of boredom busters...

[SpasticFuctard]

Not to burst your bubble boss, but the Symbian OS is not remotely a MS product, nor is it running a windows CE Kernel. It's a wholly home grown thing by Symbian corporation which is based around a Messaging Middleware System (all of its events are asynchronous non-blocking occurences, no matter what they look like to the programmer). It seems to have a Personal Java VM built into it, which allows for any 1.1.x application to run under it... increasing their installable software base to... oh... any applet ever written for browser consumption. That said, I'd still write games for it in C++, the speed on Java (no matter what my fellow Java sycophants say) is just unacceptable for gaming. Especially the graphics draw stuff.

SF - My hit points in this game are inexcusable!

[Nynaeve]

Not to burst your bubble boss, but the Symbian OS is not remotely a MS product, nor is it running a windows CE Kernel. It's a wholly home grown thing by Symbian corporation which is based around a Messaging Middleware System (all of its events are asynchronous non-blocking occurences, no matter what they look like to the programmer). It seems to have a Personal Java VM built into it, which allows for any 1.1.x application to run under it... increasing their installable software base to... oh... any applet ever written for browser consumption. That said, I'd still write games for it in C++, the speed on Java (no matter what my fellow Java sycophants say) is just unacceptable for gaming. Especially the graphics draw stuff.

SF - My hit points in this game are inexcusable!

Yep yep, Monsieur SF is correct:

Enabling Technologies:
XHTML,
Java MIDP 1.0,
Symbian OS v6.1

:D

[chadtower]

[
psst...Chad...you're making me swoon with all your technobabble...

:kiss:

LOL Sorry, I tend to think in those terms since that's what I do for a living (and happen to be juggling in 15 other windows right now). I actually know very little about portable devices and cell phones, I'm just trying to apply my technical background against some basic assumptions. I'm actually surprised that they would bother with Java. The phones must have more computing resources available to them than I had assumed.

Does anyone know offhand the architecture of the cell phone pcb? At least a basic idea, as in if it's traditional like a general computer with many integrated parts or if it's specialised?

[SpasticFuctard]

The new 3650 has an ARM processor in it (Same processor architecture as in the iPaq's and the high end Palm devices) meaning it will run between 125 and 400 MHz, with 64 MB of memory integrated in most of these suckers (quite a bit of which gets chewed up by storage, but still) and a stripped down semaphore based Messaging OS, there's actually quite a bit of computing power available to these suckers. You're not going to see Symbian running on anyhing with a Dragonball processor in it, but frankly if you've still got a 16MHz processor in anything you consider a computer, you need to join the rest of us here in the future.

SF - Soon, my cyberware will be complete and I can lead my cyborg army to total domination of the planet.

[Raccoon Lad]

On a side-note about how inefficient Java is, I worked on porting Night Stalker (intellivision) to a few cell phones, when the game was done it ended up being around 45K, whereas the original INTV game was only 4K. Our programmer tried his best to make it smaller, but it's impossible to be efficient with Java it seems.

[chadtower]

On a side-note about how inefficient Java is, I worked on porting Night Stalker (intellivision) to a few cell phones, when the game was done it ended up being around 45K, whereas the original INTV game was only 4K. Our programmer tried his best to make it smaller, but it's impossible to be efficient with Java it seems.

Java isn't meant to be effient to run, it's meant to be efficient to develop. That's what happens when you take something originally written in assembly and port it to a noncompiled, object oriented language.

[chadtower]

The new 3650 has an ARM processor in it (Same processor architecture as in the iPaq's and the high end Palm devices) meaning it will run between 125 and 400 MHz, with 64 MB of memory integrated in most of these suckers (quite a bit of which gets chewed up by storage, but still) and a stripped down semaphore based Messaging OS, there's actually quite a bit of computing power available to these suckers.

up to 400mhz... wow, a lot more horsepower than I would have thought. That memory must not be processor memory, though, if it's accessible to storage. What type of processing memory would one of these suckers have?

[SpasticFuctard]

I dunno about impossible... It's difficult, yeah. There are innumerate tricks that they don't teach you anywhere, and it's compounded by the internal termination analysis the compiler does. Still, graphics draw stuff gets pretty hairy. Building sprites and whatnot in an interpreted language is going to be pretty costly in terms of the code required to make it work right. Oh and you can pretty much guarantee that the garbage collector wont run as often or efficiently as you want it to, causing what appears to be a memory leak. Java sucks for this sort of thing. What it's good for is crossplatform delivery of business applications; thats about it.

SF

[chadtower]

Java sucks for this sort of thing. What it's good for is crossplatform delivery of business applications; thats about it.


That and the ridiculous amount of code reuse that goes on in Java. Every time I tried to write a decent sized app in Java I found that my app was full of bugs. Not my bugs, mind you, but bugs in the classes I was calling that were supposedly tested. I hate using massive calling trees for that reason.

[SpasticFuctard]

Chad: They'll allocate as much as you've got free, dynamic allocation of the Heap is something that these things all have in common( Palm 3.0+, Symbian, CE, SavaJe) they default to about 8MB and won't let you make off with any of that (My experience was with the iPaq). A lot of the devices do however limit the max heapsize of the JVM, and Palm has a legacy issue from the pre ARM days where no object in memory can ever exceed 64k (has to do with their serialization mechanism).

My most recent project has been working with a stripped down version of Java with most of it's low level native functions written in C and Assembly, called SuperWaba. It's cool and it'll run on a GBA; I am excited to play with it there, as those damn things have some pretty serious computing power on the cheap.

SF

[chadtower]

Chad: They'll allocate as much as you've got free, dynamic allocation of the Heap is something that these things all have in common( Palm 3.0+, Symbian, CE, SavaJe) they default to about 8MB and won't let you make off with any of that (My experience was with the iPaq).

Oh, interesting. So if, say, the base OS is about 10meg, and you've got 64meg available with no addtional apps, you can have up to around 54meg of processing memory? Then, I would assume, you install a 4meg game, and are down to around 50meg (give or take) of available memory? That's kind of cool. I suppose that's one way of miniaturizing the architecture.

[bargora]

Piracy floodgates open on N-Gage; Nokia vows revenge (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=new&aid=2555)

What kind of revenge? What, they gonna kill our mothers or something?
My name is Nokia Montoya. You killed my taco. Prepare to die.