Trial by Fire. I just looked it up and one of the first handful of screenshots looked almost exactly like this.

I've never played it and never would've thought of it, so the W goes to you IMO. All I was confident of was that the graphics and UI screamed "early 2000s PC game".

This is amazing. I've been on a bit of a J2ME jag lately, and it can be difficult to find working copies of games, and then guess the requirements for running them. There are archives of dozens of copies of the same game, all with nearly identical file names, but each one has been tweaked for a different series of phones. Which file targets which phones? Who knows?!

I loaded your .jar into my emulator and it worked first time. I had also seen this specific game and wanted to play it, but it seemed only to be available in Russian and Chinese.

Thanks for all your hard work. It's really appreciated!

For anyone who's interested in J2ME horror, I also recommend the Silent Hill Orphan series. There are three games that I know of; point-and-click first-person adventures with simple combat. I bought and played them on an actual phone back in the day, but I think they're still good in emulation.

I'm sorry if you've already checked this, but I had a similar problem with a Windows laptop recently that just would NOT stay in standby. It wasn't a question of if, but how long.

Eventually I found that some "Wake on IP' settings were set to "Wake on any/all IP traffic". I switched those off and now the thing stays in standby/screen blanked.

I was confused at first, because I saw this post less than an hour after it went up, but the game wasn't free. Then I read the top post by developer and found that the game is free with ads through some other site/service called "Playmanity".

Here's a direct link.

Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would've blown out and ruined the game.

I don't think that an NES or Master System port could've covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could've replicated a lot of the arcade's scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don't know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I've seen it called the "Trash-80" more than a couple of times.

What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn't which platform you start them on; it's starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.

As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we're naturally going to defend A with our life. That's because without really thinking about it, we've bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

I have an RP2+ so I don't know if it's exactly the same, but with most Android devices, if you've configured the SD as an extension of internal memory, then no, it won't work (and might screw some things up on the old device if you remove it). But if you're just using it as external storage, I don't think there should be any problem.

If you might be interested but don't want to click a random link without knowing what it's for, this is a video about the history of a Mario 64 speedrun category, 120 stars, which involves collecting every star in the game.

How do you think your A.R.S.E. compares to Microsoft's planned Binary Universal Technology Translation System, and Sony's upcoming Original Software Heuristic Inter-platform Real-time Interpreter?

I like the big offering from MS, I cannot lie. Sony's outline looks well-rounded, too. I searched online, but I haven't seen any real details about your system. Even after I put down my phone and got on my desktop to type on a proper keyboard, I couldn't find A.R.S.E. with both hands.

We'd better keep an eye out for them in the future.

I have been emulating many different systems (including SNES) on lots of platforms, and have almost never been bothered by lag in the emulation itself.

But one day someone was harping on about lag in an SNES game, so I loaded it up (Android RA SNES9x core) just to double-check before arguing with them... and indeed found the lag quite noticeable. But I also found two ways to reduce the lag significantly.

The first thing is to try different cores. There are multiple versions of SNES9x available on most versions of Retroarch, and there's a reason for it. The different cores can give surprisingly different results for a single game.

The second thing (which had the greater impact for me) is to enable Retroarch's look-ahead emulation for one or two frames. Just as it sounds, this will cause the core to emulate the next n frames with every possible combination of inputs. It increases the processing requirements exponentially, but for something like the SNES, many platforms can handle it. I know it seems counterintuitive (if it can emulate hundreds or thousands of possible frames in realtime, why can't it do just one?) but it worked for me. It must be some kind of throughput vs. latency thing.

I haven't used it for a while, but the last time I was using Lakka I don't think it had been ported to Pi yet. It worked great and was very much for PCs. I don't know about interfaces though; my install booted straight into RetroArch which isn't the slickest-looking thing but worked fine for me.

Make sure to check compatibility lists for the emulators you want to use. You may be surprised by how many games don't run/can't be finished/have major glitches on later systems like PS2, PS3, and GameCube. Also, there are no PS3 RetroArch cores, so you'll need to use the standalone version of RPCS3.