Samurai Romanesque, J2ME, and the Battle for Mobile Cyberspace

use of wireless technology, but the role-playing game, Samurai Romanesque, shown in Figure 1, from Japanese game developer Dwango is no trivial matter. The game is available on Japan’s NTT DoCoMo packetswitched i-mode network. Players take a virtual journey through 15th-century Japan, engage other players in real-time battles, visit a thousand historical towns and villages, practice the art of Zen, and even have virtual children. This massive multiplayer role-playing game can accommodate half a million gamers simultaneously. Rendered in color, and resembling the graphics quality of the (8-bit) Game Boy, the game takes the wireless Internet to a new level of complexity and is a sign of things to come, that is, cyberspace on the go. Dwango built Samurai Romanesque on the Java 2 platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), a compact version of Sun Microsystems’ Java 2 programming environment. J2ME suits applications such as cell phones, pagers, set-top boxes, and other devices with limited memory and slow processors. NTT DoCoMo’s technology uses Sun’s reduced K virtual machine, but the company developed its own proprietary version of mobile Java (called DoJa), see Figure 2. The standard application programming interface for J2ME, the mobile information device profile, primarily supports text-based screens, and doesn’t cope well with graphics. NTT DoCoMo’s version of J2ME—i-Appli, short for Internet applications—supports GIF, horizontal scrolling, list boxes, and other graphics-based functions. The company worked with Japanese handset makers and Sun Microsystems in the US and Japan to develop the required handset technology, shown in Figure 3, and launched its Java service in early 2001.