Though in all seriousness, Japan's early cell phone scene was so far ahead of anyone else's it's insane that barely anyone knows about it. They invented emoji, QR codes, essentially made selfies a thing (which were called 'i-shot'), first 3G network, contactless payments and tickets; but most importantly, mobile games that didn't suck. They also eventually created Gacha but that's the duality of man I suppose. Garake (which is an affectionate name for them that is a portmantaeu of 'Galapagos' and 'keitai') were so far ahead that it even took Apple over a decade to catch up with them properly. Words can't express how much I wish I could have been there.
I have 2 phones here with the UIM (basically a CDMA SIM) in them, both of them quite late. I bought both of these on the off chance that they might have some of the Shin Megami Tensei games that are super rare and very cool. I even translated a playthrough of Aegis: The First Mission and documented a whole bunch of games years ago. I would kill to see a copy of Atelier Iris 2 After Episode or Persona 3 Em though.
They were sold as a big lot which i bought on a whim, and are unfortunately full of old personal information (which I deleted dw) but also some games. It looks like devices that have a UIM card inside them will still have the games but will also run i-appli even if you're out of range. The games are an interesting spread, mostly 'mainstream' stuff but there's some interesting oddities.
This is my personal favourite in my collection. It's a super late slide-phone with a touch screen on top. This was when the iPhone was becoming more popular (just before it also ruined the world) so NEC probably wanted to appeal to people who were interested in that but also didn't want to drop the way-cooler feature-phone ecosystem yet. You can even use most of it with the touch-screen and unlock it by sliding, wonder where they got that idea from?
This model's also very interesting because it has WiFi, Bluetooth and a TV antenna. There aren't many FOMA devices that have WiFi, so I wanted this one to play around with. The build quality's great and the screen still looks amazing. If this was 4G i'd probably start using it over my battered Galaxy S5, it's so cool. Sadly I couldn't get the WiFi to work all that much, I was able to browse the internet but couldn't get into any of the i-mode stuff without being in range.
Here's the games
Ridge Racer Mobile is unfortunately not too different from the J2ME port that we got, but it's still cool to see a different version. It's pretty easy to decompile J2ME games so there's a decent chance that this could be useful in comparing if we can decompile i-appli. It still manages to be better than the Zeebo port.
Famista is also what you expect, though it's cool to see the Famicom yakyuu lads playing a few games on a flip phone still with cool sprite art. I think the FM version is relating to some sort of multiplayer
The Taiken games are pretty interesting. I wasn't really sure what 'Taiken' meant in this instance but I'm not saying no to Megaman or Street Fighter II.
Naturally there's also a puzzle game on here, nothing too crazy though.
A flip-phone, but definitely also a later one. I have another one that is near identical called a N906iu, but this one has a UIM and some games on it. It's definitely grosser than the slidey boi but useable. I really like how thin they were able to make these compared to ours, and it even has a standard microSD slot which makes it better than alot of flagships today!
The Games
Tobal M is probably the most obscure and interesting game I have here. It's a fully 3D fighting game based on the original PS1 game that exactly 0 people remember. Tobal is pretty interesting because the visuals were done by Akira Toriyama and the 3D here showcases the capability of these devices. I'm sure someone out there was looking for it and obscure games like this popping up give me hope that some of the weirder titles I'm interested in will pop up someday.
I like Fortune Street, and I also have a bit of a penchant for the semi-anime characters that Japanese games of this type have. So finding this on there was pretty cool, made by Square-Enix so it's pretty legit. Just a good version of Fortune Street that you could take with you on the go if you lived in Japan in the 2000s.
And of course, since these phones are right smack in the middle of the Wii era, we have a Bowling game that lets you use your own avatar. These are actually made on the phone and can be used for different applications interchangeably which is a neat idea. Other than that, It's definitely a bowling game on a flip phone.
I wanted to try and crack these phones using the help of the folks at KahviBreak but unfortunately I don't have the right cable. Most FOMA phones have the same connector but you need one with 6 pins, and mine only have 3 pins because they're not data-cables. This is a bit of a pain since getting a 6 pin connector is difficult and quite expensive. I estimated it would be around 40USD just for the one cable and it would take a month before I'd get it.
Now, the N-02A has already been dumped, but the N-05C hasn't. I obviously want to do that without risking the device but, I'd be waiting a long while and would be paying alot for the proper cable. I thought about ripping out the pins from a micro-USB cable and jerry rigging those in but that wouldn't work. This is where I developed a good idea that sounds awful. What if I just removed the connector and soldered the USB cable directly to the phone?
This would effectively create a hard-wired cable. Luckily I already have the FOMA pinout and after doing a continuity test on the connector / PCB I found the pins just connect up 1-10 on the board as per normal. The problem is how ridiculously small the pads are and how close they are. Getting the old connector off would be a bit of a pain but not impossible, but soldering individual wires to each of those pads without soldering them together and destroying the phone and all the games was super scary.
But then again, I didn't really want to string this project out over another month and make it way more expensive. I have a USB cable with thin wires, the pins that actually need to be connected aren't super close (the ground cable is actually 3 pins connected together) and if I was careful, used flux and a thin tip on the iron I thought it was doable. I had a scrap N901iS to test with too. I saw that the pins you had to solder on the actual connector were pretty similarly spaced so I'd have to get over my fear either way.
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