Just sat here having a grand ole time fiddling around with Blitz Basic, and a thought occured to me: how easy is it to program your own games for mobile phones? Anyone out there know? What program would you use, how would you find out how to program a specific phone? (Screen sizes, graphics, audio etc.)

It can't be that much harder than programming machine code for a Speccy, so why isn't everyone doing it?

they're programmed in Java, you can find tutorials on the tinternet :) I might make one sometime, once I've finished with all my Uni work and have a little spare time on my hands.

They are called midlets and programmed in java as xafier said. Only done the basic 'hello world' one myself to see what was involved but i did toy around with actually making a game but was stuck for ideas.

Last time i had a hunt around for information about this i came across a variety of libraries that ease the pain so to speak that are specifically designed for making games. Sort of like direct x but for phones.

As for comparing machine code to java, well it's a whole different mindset as you've got to get to grips with OOP ( Object Oriented Programming ). If you really want to dive right in then learn some java basics, download a simple open source java game and look at the code. Hopefully any example code you find will be well commented.

Cheers, guys. I'm defo going to check this out as it sounds fun. (I do know a little C++, which is a start).

np Ant, when i learned java i didn't know C++, and still don't, but from what i understand they are quite similar. I knew C from my day's at college and Uni years ago so the syntax made sence at least.

There's a free open source Java editor that I use when doing Java called eclipse. It's quite good but can be a pain to setup if the version of the Java Development Kit you have installed is different from what the eclipse software was made for.

Personally i'd recommend JDK 1.4 and eclipse 3.0 as the last time i installed these together it seemed to be relativly stable.

www.eclipse.org for the editor
www.sun.com for the JDK

hope this helps.

I'm sure it will. Cheers, AaronD