Organizational matters

[jan-kleks]

It looks like FreeJ2ME has made news. Congrats! Because more and more people are getting interested in your project I think it might be a good idea to tackle a few organizational matters:

-- write about project goals (how people can help)

-- some simple roadmap would be nice (no particular dates are necessary)

-- focus development efforts in one place, GitHub is the most popular, so I guess it's the best choice. I don't agree with recompile when it comes to this "I'm not on github, which is why I put it on sourceforge. I've found that github can be difficult for casual users to use. (unintentional alliteration)" Look for the best place for developers, users would probably want to download FreeJ2ME with RetroArch anyway.

-- if you want to use Retropie forums for discussion, you may want to put a link here as well

-- what is the official spelling? "freej2me" or "FreeJ2ME"? :P

[recompileorg]

Hex looks to be leading the project from this point forward. He's better positioned to outline those sorts of goals. I'd give him a few days to both dig in to the codebase and hear from users before expecting a roadmap. There's a lot that still needs done, and it will be difficult to prioritize things at this stage.

Also, I accidentally lied. Apparently, I had a GitHub account.

[jan-kleks]

@recompileorg Maybe it would a good idea to inform people at SourceForge.net that this is the main repo now (you can probably delete the SF repo after some time)? People have already started asking questions there...

[recompileorg]

I've pointed the support page here and added a note to the description.

[jan-kleks]

Since there are practically no good video reviews of J2ME games (in comparison to other retro stuff), and googling "best J2ME games" does not necessarily return satisfactory results -- people have problems with finding good J2ME game recommendations, and they may think that there are no decent titles.

I suggest posting links to places where users can look for J2ME game recommendations (not game files themselves!) on the project page, so that users would be more willing to test different games:

Mobile Game Faqs

Pocket Gamer reviews

Airgamer (click on "Weiter" to see the next page)

Maybe you know other good sites of this kind? There were probably more in the past (now one would have to use Web Archive...). Also, many built-in Java games that came with cellphones were cool, but I can't find a comprehensive list. People liked, for example, Bounce so much that a level editor was created (for a Java game!).

[hex007]

This is indeed a good suggestion. Currently I have a list of games that have been tested. I can add a game list that can be updated by users.

[jan-kleks]

Maybe, FreeJ2ME (I'm still confused by the spelling :P), could ship with a free open-source J2ME game, so that people could quickly check if it works with their setup, without even looking for any additional JARs. Check out for instance: Asteroid Zone

[jan-kleks]

There is also this little gem, Opposite Lock: "A highly regarded commercial J2ME title now released as open source. Take your pick from 10 maxed-out street legal racers and prove your mettle on 10 international tracks. The game has three modes of play, practice, tournament or time trial, with up to 8-way multiplayer on supporting handsets."

[jan-kleks]

@recompileorg has mentioned on reddit problems with finding good Mascot API documentation, I suggest creating a separate Issue for this. Maybe someone will help.

[jan-kleks]

@recompileorg Is this what you wanted (check out the docs, archived link)?

[recompileorg]

I've installed that sdk before, but don't really want to install it again just to see if I missed it.

Assuming you've already installed it, does it have usable javadocs for com.mascotcapsule.micro3d?

[jan-kleks]

@recompileorg This link will expire in one day. Now you don't have to install anything.

[recompileorg]

You could have just told me it was included.

Still, yes, this is what was needed. Though there are some questions that, hopefully, someone who has used this in the past can answer. One has been bugging me for a while, I think I even have a comment about it in the source.

The docs you provided say that Vector3d.outerProduct "Calculates the outer product between this vector and the specified vector. The outerProduct(this, v) call and result are the same. The result will be stored in the vector itself." Which I find baffling, as the outer product of two vec3's should be a 3x3 matrix! iirc, I took a guess and found the cross product, but I had hoped for some confirmation.

With any luck, the rest of the docs are less ambiguous. Still, it's better than nothing.

[jan-kleks]

RetroArch: "We will be putting the Java J2ME core on our buildbot soon. Note that this core will require an external dependency; you will need to have a Java JVM installed for this core to work. Unfortunately it would not be trivial to write the libretro core in such a way that it wouldn't require an external dependency like that." I guess soon you may want to put a link to RetroArch on the main page of the project...

[hex007]

@jan-kleks Please cite your source. Where can I read more about this?

Edit : Found it here https://www.patreon.com/posts/progress-report-14647713?utm_campaign=postshare&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

[jan-kleks]

@hex007 @recompileorg @nikita36078 An update regarding the FreeJ2ME core for libretro/RetroArch by @meepingsnesroms

freej2me was running using oracle java and sending the framebuffer to RetroArch through printf, I was going to port a jvm to run it properly but it requires awt librarys, I contacted the author of SquirrelJVM who is writing an embedded j2me implementation and jvm and they said a custom jvm in c would be better and offered to write one so I am currently waiting for that C jvm then I would port it to RetroArch.

@meepingsnesroms also told me that if you'd be interested in some form of cooperation (including @nikita36078 ) you can try to use the SquirrelJME discord for this.

Regards and keep up good work everyone!

[hex007]

@jan-kleks Can you share the link to the pot mentioning this. I would like to read more

[jan-kleks]

@hex007 It was a reddit post. I guess if you want to know more, the best thing to do would be to contact @meepingsnesroms

[jan-kleks]

I guess Symbian and BREW are beyond the scope of this project. But what about platforms which are built upon modified/extended J2ME?

DoJa/Star

S!アプリ

EZアプリ (Java)

Check out also Project i-mode / EZweb, to preserve the dying unpreservable

ExEn

It's obvious that FreeJ2ME should focus for the time being on standard J2ME, however it might be wise to start gathering info regarding these platforms to save as many SDKs and resources as possible for future work... Of course, if you are interested guys (there are quite a few interesting exotic games for these platforms).

[minexew]

@jan-kleks Please, PLEASE, do! In a separate repository, if you must, but let's gather these materials before they're gone

[minexew]

As for having a custom JVM, the phoneME codebase definitely seems viable, and being official, should also be very robust in terms of code quality