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J2ME Game Development: Issues and Troubleshooting(TM) -The OEMs

by Massimo Perrone (Hanami Solutions)

2.0 The OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers)

As if there weren't enough many problems this way, some more emerge from diversity introduced by mobile phone makers. Let me clarify on this point. Most important players in the market like Nokia, Siemens and so on, introduced customary APIs for the development of mobile games on their platforms. On one hand this is undoubtly a positive thing because it allows excellent addictional features for our applications (like being able to add real soundtracks to our games, support for vibration and backlight functions) on the other hand it seriously spoil compatibility between different versions of our software. One have to face a choice, whether to support just one brand or to find a different solution. While anything done graphically with these APIs can be remade with custom code, on the musical side things get quite complex. Indeed J2ME doesn't feature specifical classes and methods for sound support and even if Sun tried to solve this issue by releasing MIDP 2.0, what about the many platforms supporting MIDP 1.0? Few solutions are available. Most famous one is to use method

 
system.getProperty("microedition.platform")
everytime the program is initialized and examine returned string to see what platforms (Nokia, Siemens, etc) the device we're using belongs to and take our countermeasures. This way for every specific situation we will use its own API according to its custom format and handling all the addictional features like backlight and vibrations.


 

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