You can use Android Studio (or other virtualization / emulation) to set up an older version of Android and then you use one of the various sites that "archive" games:
I've used Bluestacks to play the entire somewhat recent Monkey Island game on PC because I could not be bothered to play it on my phone but I have no idea how far back their versions go.
How about making a new game with help from your son (even if it’s ideas) and making some new memories? ;-)
The problem I found is that a lot of the stuff I made is tied to the hardware, OS and SDKs I used to make and run it (especially PalmOS and J2ME stuff - although Apple is just as bad.)
Luckily I’ve been able to find an emulator called Cloudpilot Emu to run some of my old PalmOS games in the browser.
I think if I was doing a game now and wanted to be able to look back on it in 10 to 20 years time I’d be doing it in C with SDL or JavaScript - although you’re betting on those being around. Or at least some virtual machine / runtime that could be ported to some new OS / platform.
The Internet Archive already has some emulation support, perhaps Android support is needed? If OP is willing to transfer the copyright to the Archive for $1, I'm happy to facilitate so it has a permanent home.
I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about.
So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot.
Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?
> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder
Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium. I've got years of random side projects and pretty much every photo I've taken going back many years. It's a complete mess, with various duplications, it's just not that big (few hundred GB maybe? I'm away from home so can't open up my NAS and look) so not worth my time to optimize it.
On the flip side it's fun to randomly browse through and take a trip down memory lane. When there's a particular thing I definitely want can be more of a pain to find than if I had any decent organization but that comes up rarely enough that I don't really care.
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep and a Backblaze bucket (or other S3 compatible target). Can always search, organize, retrieve in the future as sibling comments have mentioned.
1. beware of encryption, especially Microsoft and Apple. I've encrypted Apple disk images with lost passwords, and USB drives that I'm not sure I'll ever decrypt now that I've mostly moved to Linux
2. USB drives rot. I have at least one sitting on my desk that doesn't work, or doesn't work with Linux, or is encrypted, I can't tell but I think it's dead and I've no idea what's on it
3. assume anything other than text or open formats will be useless later. I've a ton of info archived in closed proprietary formats that I might never be able to access.
Duplication is inevitable. I've a box of CD/DVD archives, a dozen large USB drives, two NAS, and half a dozen computers, and with all that storage and space I can't even have a definitive music collection. It's on both NAS, multiple computers, an MP3 player, my phone, and all the copies are different. We've 14 terabytes of photos, and so I now need to buy another NAS to replace the two I have and keep the old ones as a backup. It's endless curation, both for hardware and data.
And yet, the code I've lost. The photos that didn't make it to backup. I have those regrets too, like they were truly valuable.
Final thoughts: cloud storage isn't storage, it's short term for shuffling data between devices. Even email isn't secure - Yahoo deleted all my messages without warning because I didn't log in for a year.
As far as software projects go I'd say GitHub or whatever VCS you prefer. For photos and documents etc you could look into cloud storage like OneDrive. A friend recently told me about filen.io which provides a similar service but with encryption. Not sure whether OneDrive also supports encryption.
The Tiger Woods PGA Tour game on IPhone in the 2010s was a full fledged PGA tour game with fun entirely 3D golf courses and a full career of tournaments and points to earn and spend, I consider the best full 3D game ever on IPhone and spent many hours playing it
That game was ahead of its time. My team worked on the post launch updates/ports of it, and because it was well optimized for the original dev target it was actually a bit of a pain! (The shadows especially).
It was working on that which caused us to find a certain SoC supplier saying different things to different manufacturers.
I'm not sure where to find the APKs/IPAs, but once you do, I wonder if using Claude Code or some other LLM tools could help you update the app (or reverse engineer) for modern OS versions. It's something that I've been thinking to do for my 2012 obsoleted microjournaling app.
They could, but then so can a lot of tools. At least with Android, it’s still Java so you can just emulate the runtime and run the app. To upgrade, just decompile the Java bytecode back into something editable.
I had this same issue with one of my “long lost” games only, it wasn’t a mobile game but a console game, so Ghidra was my only hope.
You can use Android Studio (or other virtualization / emulation) to set up an older version of Android and then you use one of the various sites that "archive" games:
https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/past-releases/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/54420/putter-king-adventure-g...
I've used Bluestacks to play the entire somewhat recent Monkey Island game on PC because I could not be bothered to play it on my phone but I have no idea how far back their versions go.
How about making a new game with help from your son (even if it’s ideas) and making some new memories? ;-)
The problem I found is that a lot of the stuff I made is tied to the hardware, OS and SDKs I used to make and run it (especially PalmOS and J2ME stuff - although Apple is just as bad.)
Luckily I’ve been able to find an emulator called Cloudpilot Emu to run some of my old PalmOS games in the browser.
I think if I was doing a game now and wanted to be able to look back on it in 10 to 20 years time I’d be doing it in C with SDL or JavaScript - although you’re betting on those being around. Or at least some virtual machine / runtime that could be ported to some new OS / platform.
I found an Android version of your game on 4pda, Russian forum about devices and apps: https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=290300#entry102680...
Amazing! Now you need to find a device that can still run it :-)
The Internet Archive already has some emulation support, perhaps Android support is needed? If OP is willing to transfer the copyright to the Archive for $1, I'm happy to facilitate so it has a permanent home.
https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload
(I already archived the APK in Wayback just in case the source in this thread disappears)
Probably safest to run it in an emulator with no internet access, given where it was found.
APKs are signed so assuming OP can verify his own certificate he might be lucky enough to not have to dig that deep.
jadx can probably disassemble it pretty thoroughly. I think you can give it the APK directly, or just unzip it and give it the classes.dex.
Assuming everything goes smoothly, you could potentially resurrect a compilable project in about a man-week, or two, or three...
Emulator with gen ai tool! That's it! Sanitize it then fix.
Considering the website is on your Github, are you sure the game code isn't there too in a private repo? https://github.com/diasks2/putterking
Try searching this:
It brings up a few possibilities, many in other languages. Possibly these, but I haven't actually downloaded it and they seem a bit dodgy:https://www.dertz.in/games/download-Putter-King-Adventure-Go...
https://apkpure.com/cn/putter-king/com.putterkingllc.putterk...
Where did the source code go?
I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.
I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about.
So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot.
Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?
> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder
Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium. I've got years of random side projects and pretty much every photo I've taken going back many years. It's a complete mess, with various duplications, it's just not that big (few hundred GB maybe? I'm away from home so can't open up my NAS and look) so not worth my time to optimize it.
On the flip side it's fun to randomly browse through and take a trip down memory lane. When there's a particular thing I definitely want can be more of a pain to find than if I had any decent organization but that comes up rarely enough that I don't really care.
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep and a Backblaze bucket (or other S3 compatible target). Can always search, organize, retrieve in the future as sibling comments have mentioned.
Three things that have bitten me recently:
1. beware of encryption, especially Microsoft and Apple. I've encrypted Apple disk images with lost passwords, and USB drives that I'm not sure I'll ever decrypt now that I've mostly moved to Linux
2. USB drives rot. I have at least one sitting on my desk that doesn't work, or doesn't work with Linux, or is encrypted, I can't tell but I think it's dead and I've no idea what's on it
3. assume anything other than text or open formats will be useless later. I've a ton of info archived in closed proprietary formats that I might never be able to access.
Duplication is inevitable. I've a box of CD/DVD archives, a dozen large USB drives, two NAS, and half a dozen computers, and with all that storage and space I can't even have a definitive music collection. It's on both NAS, multiple computers, an MP3 player, my phone, and all the copies are different. We've 14 terabytes of photos, and so I now need to buy another NAS to replace the two I have and keep the old ones as a backup. It's endless curation, both for hardware and data.
And yet, the code I've lost. The photos that didn't make it to backup. I have those regrets too, like they were truly valuable.
Final thoughts: cloud storage isn't storage, it's short term for shuffling data between devices. Even email isn't secure - Yahoo deleted all my messages without warning because I didn't log in for a year.
As far as software projects go I'd say GitHub or whatever VCS you prefer. For photos and documents etc you could look into cloud storage like OneDrive. A friend recently told me about filen.io which provides a similar service but with encryption. Not sure whether OneDrive also supports encryption.
I really want to store things locally though, and then just stick with cloud as backup. The problem is I also don't want to manage anything complex.
If you have a NAS you can run Gogs as a container for a git repo.
if you have a NAS you can just use a bare git directory as a remote
I do this, works exceptionally well. It also works via a USB key.
The Tiger Woods PGA Tour game on IPhone in the 2010s was a full fledged PGA tour game with fun entirely 3D golf courses and a full career of tournaments and points to earn and spend, I consider the best full 3D game ever on IPhone and spent many hours playing it
That game was ahead of its time. My team worked on the post launch updates/ports of it, and because it was well optimized for the original dev target it was actually a bit of a pain! (The shadows especially).
It was working on that which caused us to find a certain SoC supplier saying different things to different manufacturers.
I'm not sure where to find the APKs/IPAs, but once you do, I wonder if using Claude Code or some other LLM tools could help you update the app (or reverse engineer) for modern OS versions. It's something that I've been thinking to do for my 2012 obsoleted microjournaling app.
They could, but then so can a lot of tools. At least with Android, it’s still Java so you can just emulate the runtime and run the app. To upgrade, just decompile the Java bytecode back into something editable.
I had this same issue with one of my “long lost” games only, it wasn’t a mobile game but a console game, so Ghidra was my only hope.