How can I put old text-parser or adventure games on my phone?

December 18, 2010 12:03 PM

How can I put old text-parser or adventure games on my phone?

I recently capitulated and bought a cell phone, and yes, it has proven useful. It's an LG keybo, the kind of phone where you can flip it open to unearth a qwerty keyboard and a decent sized screen.

Naturally, as soon as I gazed upon it, my first thought was "I wonder if I can put old Sierra adventure games on this bad-boy".

Full keyboard? Arrow controls? View screen? To me, this all screamed "Kings Quest" and other text-command games of the era.

My question is, does anyone have an idea as to how I might go about making this nerdy fantasy come true? The phone has a MicroSD input, so I could conceivably have up to 4gb of space available for data, but I have no idea if a process exists to mount these old adventure games or text-parsers onto a cell phone.

Does the hive mind have any suggestions?

posted by sarastro to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

King's Quest and other popular Sierra games weren't text based. They were GUI games with text interfaces that typically included mouse support. So your phone needs to replicate the graphics subsystem, perform animation, sounds, etc. Its sounds like you have a cheap feature phone. I'm not sure how feasible this is on those types of phones. If you want retro gaming you should return it for a decent Android phone and run ScummVM.
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:02 PM on December 18, 2010

Sierra games prior to around space quest 4/kings quest 5(?) did rely on a text parser and could be played entirely without a mouse, though they started adding more mouse shortcuts towards the end of that phase. It seems like your best bet is to try to see if you can get dosbox running on your phone (since dosbox is about the only way you are going to run a sierra game from this timeframe on any modern machine). This is apparently possible for some phones. I suspect not for that one though...
posted by advil at 3:20 PM on December 18, 2010

Can you run a browser? Zork in Javascript, the hard way.
posted by the Real Dan at 3:43 PM on December 18, 2010

I think Zarf is planning to write some new text adventures for phones.
posted by novalis_dt at 9:05 PM on December 18, 2010

This claims to be a J2ME port of Sarien and so should run on your phone. However, even if it works, it seems your phone won't allow you to install custom applications without hackery, so this will be a major project (but not as major as figuring out that it's "put gem into mouth" instead of "put gem in mouth" in SC2, poor eleven-year-old non-native me).
posted by themel at 2:27 AM on December 19, 2010