Trying to get a game working on a cell phone

Anyone want to help me figure out why a cell phone game doesn’t work on my new cell phone? I spent hours googling and came up empty. If anyone wonders why cellphone gaming will never take off, its because buying and playing games on cellphones is super unfriendly. Any ways…

I got a new Nokia 6555. My wife got it for me so I don’t know if its a good phone or not. It plays some games. I bought a few and all worked except one.

I bought Leisure suit larry love for sail from AT&Ts media net. When I run the game I get application error and the error is: java.lang.nullpointerexception

I contact AT&T and they say the game is listed as compatable. I write VU moblie games and they say it should work, I should rest the phone or contact the manufacture.

I contact nokia and their reply is:

Robert, the specifications for the Java architecture on your Nokia 6555 phone are as follows:
CLDC 1.1
JSR 120 Wireless Messaging API
JSR 135 Mobile Media API
JSR 172 Web Services API
JSR 177 Security and Trust Services API
JSR 184 Mobile 3D Graphics API
JSR 185 JTWI
JSR 205 Wireless Messaging API
JSR 226 Scalable 2D Vector Graphics API
JSR 234 Advanced Multimedia Supplements
JSR 248 Mobile Service Architecture for CLDC JSR 75 FileConnection and PIM API JSR 82 Bluetooth API MIDP 2.1 Nokia UI API

We recommend that you contact ‘VU Games’ to verify that their application fits with the above mentioned specifications.

I contact VU and they write back it should work.

So… What should I do? Any ideas?

A null pointer exception means that the build itself is broken somehow. It could be a memory problem and a failure to trigger an out of memory exception (unlikely for that phone). That would be one reason to reset the phone – but I assume you did that. It’s a J2ME build. There’s no reason that shouldn’t work on your phone. My shot-in-the-dark is that they are giving you a build for a similar phone that they didn’t sufficiently QA and it’s just broke. Or they upgraded the firmware on the phone and it broke the build but no one did regression tests.

You’re probably fucked. Welcome to the world of cellphone games where there up to thousands of SKU’s of a given game and things fall between the cracks. AT&T is also pretty poor at maintaining their games.

It’s a good phone. There are plenty of decent games that should run on it. My personal recommendations: check out Lumines or God of War.