Hello, everyone. Back in 2019, I came across a post on the internet that talked about how to export 3D graphics for retro phones. Me, being a 3D artist, my curiousity insta-peaked. I hadn’t ever given a thought on how Retro 3D games for Japan and USA phones were made for mobile phones. This is when I decided I’ll trail in this rabbit hole with a Sony Ericsson W550. Why? Those phones are the only ones that have extra “soft keys” on top of the screen, plus I never owned one when I still wasn’t a 3D artist. Mind, Sony Ericsson phones had direct SONY JAPAN technology API to make the 3D games somewhat compliant to what they were able to derive from their Playstation 1 games. So it is a huge deal if we could get that technology back.
In 2012 Nokia made the M3G (3D Java format models) OPEN SOURCE. The Sony Ericsson developer forums shut down the next year and the information on how to code those cool java 3d games with M3G format files was literally lost.
2 Years ago (2024), I slowly started to code for the Sony Ericssonn w550 using Netbeans 6.8 in an old 2000 Compaq Laptop with 2GB ram, Windows XP 32 bits [I wanted the code to be HARDWARE compliant]. I bought books, read a lot of traces of anything I could find related to the 3D Java games topic SPECIFICALLY from 2004 (all though, yes, I followed the yellow brick road m3g, .bctra, .mtra, h3t, development until 2009), but almost no information about the 2004 FIRST version of the M3G 3D files which, on top of it all, HAS a byte-compliant security encoding.
Read ARTICLE 1 and ARTICLE 2 for a complete tech summary of the challenges.
Today, after 2 years of development and someone donating a phone sent from Europe to the USA (a physical w550), I finally completed 2 huge milestones:
- A 3D fully compliant API M3G (3D format) for Blender 3.6 (1.6 years of development) LINK>>,
- A 3D fully self-authored playable videogame “SuperAsteroid” (4 months deployment).
Right now, as a 3D developer, I am open to answering all your questions about developing 3D games for J2MELoader or the Physical W550i/600 hardware.
It’s 2026, and we can create full 3D games for retro phones like the old days in a solid, reliable JSR184 API from Blender 3.6 (I’m upgrading the exporter to Blender 4.3 as well).
I’ve also developed a 3D game with a biped rig, exporting NLA track animation and Rigid Bone Parent-Child objects in another game. Let me know if you’d like to know the benchmarks for these retro game development.
I’ll be happy to read what you think about this breakthrough.
⚙Pierre.
