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Phone handsets get Nintendo-style games
Tuesday, June 11 2002
by The Register


With mobile phone sales waning, and analysts predicting big sales for handheld
gaming devices, one company is attempting to merge the two products. 

In the past couple of weeks wireless technology developer TTPCom has been touring
companies demonstrating one of the most intensely desirable mobile phone handsets
-- a silver and blue demo unit that you'll never be able to buy (not exactly,
anyway), but that the company hopes will fire the imagination of handset
manufacturers and help trigger the mobile phone games revolution,  writes John
Lettice.





The basic premise is simple enough, and not exactly rocket science. Nintendo's
Game Boy is ARM-powered, large numbers of mobile phones are powered by ARM chips,
so how come mobile phones don't run games of Game Boy class? As The
Register observed to TTPCom, if its techies didn't know the answer to that
question before they even asked it, then the company was in big trouble. But more
properly, the development was about evolving handsets so they could function as
games consoles. 





The demo unit is of pretty standard mobile phone heft, as you can see. Note that
you can play it in both portrait and landscape mode, and that it has two extra
buttons on the top to make landscape mode play easier. Mobile phone manufacturers
needn't implement these but their addition makes a deal of sense. 





Also part of the demo is an implementation of the Nintendo game Hugo and the Evil
Mirror, plus several others. TTPCom is also trying to kickstart games development
with its games site, 9dots.net. This offers a catalogue of games, some with demos
that run on a PC available, and hosts downloads for the SDK for the company's
G-WGE application. 





G-WGE? Although the handset looks nicest and the games are most fun, the WGE is
the answer to how you make Nintendo-class games run on mobile phone handsets. The
Wireless Graphics Engine is an open platform, has a footprint of 45k, and adds
oomph to handsets' gaming capabilities. It supports heavy graphical
manipulations, multi-layered graphics with chromakey transparency and optimised
blit, zoom, rotate and scale functions. Or at least that's what Gael Rosset, head
of technology at TTPCom Denmark says in the release. We ourselves barely
understand a word of it, but the effect is pretty impressive. 





Earlier this year Toshiba licensed TTPCom's InTouch handset design for its GPRS
i-mode phone, the TS2li, which is due out shortly. TTPCom also has another as yet
undisclosed Far Eastern licensee, and on Monday Danger president and chief
executive officer Andy Rubin told The Register there was TTPCom technology
in his demo units too. 



The Register and its contents are
copyright 2002 Situation Publishing. Reprinted with permission.