Munkiki's Castles (found Nokia 3410 mobile game; 2002)

Title screen of Munkiki's Castles.

Status: Found

Date found:
10 Jul 2017 (game v1.0)
29 May 2018 (M3D Class)
08 May 2023 (game v1.03 and v1.06)
08 Jun 2023 (all language packs for game v1.06 and v1.08)

Found by:
Qwerty36078 (game v1.0)
David Richardson aka recompileorg (M3D Class)
Razvan (game v1.03 and v1.06)
Bs()Dd (all language packs for game v1.06 and v1.08)

Munkiki's Castles is a mobile game released in 2002, exclusively for the Nokia 3410 via the Club Nokia service. It was one of the first-ever mobile games to feature 3D graphics and also one of the first-ever mobile games released for the Java ME platform, albeit only for the Nokia 3410. The game features a character named Munkiki wandering around the 3D landscape by pushing and destroying the blocks to try and collect items to finish the levels.

Technically, it was one of the first-ever mobile games to feature 3D graphics, one year before OpenGL ES was standardized. Because of the limitations of the original Java ME (known as J2ME 1.0), Nick Reed and Nick Slaven had to develop a proprietary API for this game, exclusively for the Nokia 3410 mobile phone, which allows rudimentary 3D graphics rendered on a black and white cellphone display.

The Club Nokia service had already been shut down and only a very few Nokia 3410 handsets do have this game installed. Two videos of this game, as well as screenshots for this game, had been surfaced on the Internet prior to the discovery of the .jar executable file of the game and the M3D class file on July 10th, 2017, and on May 29th, 2018, respectively.

Availability

On July 10th, 2017, Lost Media Wiki user Qwerty36078 managed to get the version 1.0 .jar executable. Because the game is completely dependent on a specific set of Nokia 3410 firmware, it was previously thought that there was no way to run it in any form.

On May 29th, 2018, an emulator called FreeJ2ME released an update featuring all the software required to emulate Munkiki's Castles. Due to the unique way FreeJ2ME handles errors, recompileorg managed to reverse engineer the M3D class. Unfortunately, the emulator comes uncompiled and requires compiling on a Linux machine using instructions that could be found on the emulator's Discussion/Support thread. Luckily the pre-compiled and slightly outdated (yet capable of running Munkiki's Castles) builds of the emulator can be found on FreeJ2ME's Sourceforge page, maintained by recompileorg.

On May 8th, 2023, Razvan found and dumped versions 1.03 and 1.06 of the game using Lead's kNoK-Phoenix software to acquire Nokia 3410 full-flash .fls files and Jeep's PMM Manager to extract the games. These versions allow the player to run the final level, unlike version 1.0. They were released by Vanessa Summers, who announced it on Twitter. The executable .jar and .jad files can be downloaded from Mega here, while the raw fullflash .fls dumps can be found on the Internet Archive here.

On June 8th, 2023, Bs()Dd found all language packs to versions 1.06 and 1.08 of the game. The game JAR/JAD files were in the Nokia 3410 (NHM-2 Product Support) package for the WinTesla service program (files with names "00xx"). They were likely used for flashing into the Nokia phones' PMM memory during their production. There are 15 packages in total, differing from each other in the set of languages ​​included in the .jar file. The packages is denoted by a letter that corresponds to the PPM letter of the phone's firmware (respectively, the languages ​​available in the game correspond to the languages ​​available in the phone). However, most of the packages (Packs A-O) are for version 1.06, but the last four packages (Packs S-Y) are for version 1.08. Although there were no differences in the game data (possibly version is changed due to fixes in language translations). They are available for download at the Internet Archive or alternative Google Drive link.

Previous research on the game and specific firmware set is featured down in the next section.

Attempts to Run/Emulate

Previously, lots of research has been made on Munkiki's Castles and unfortunately, the vast majority of it is of no use; however, some of the research results are worth sharing.

There are many different emulators present for PC, but on every emulator, including KEmulator 1.00, MicroEmulator and even the native Nokia 3410 SDK fails to run this game. This is because the proprietary Nokia 3D handling class "com/nokia/mid/m3d/M3D" is missing in both the game and the emulator libraries. In fact, it was previously thought to be missing on the Internet completely. Due to the lack of information on this class, it can be speculated that the M3D class was only used in Munkiki's Castles.

Teromene's Attempt on M3D(O) Class

Munkiki's Castles running on teromene's M3D(O) class. While the interface and the player are drawn correctly, the ground objects and the notes are not visible.

A person nicknamed teromene attempted to create an M3D class reproduction. He successfully managed to emulate much of the in-game mechanics, however, the game itself is not in a playable state due to many other M3D objects being yet unemulated. The most recent known version (as for July 28th, 2018) can be downloaded here or here

Running on MAME

Among thousands of other architectures supported by MAME, various old Nokia phones are also covered, including Nokia 3410. However, as the MAME's official Nokia driver states, the "machine is skeleton", hence Nokia 3410 emulation on MAME does not work. In practice, when trying to emulate on MAME, getting past a static blank Nokia 3410 screen is not currently possible.

Search Effort on the M3D Class

Before we go, it is important to differentiate between the terms used in this section.

• M3D(O) - A library called M3D [O here stands for old, M3D(O) itself is just a nickname] used in Nokia 3410. It contains a class of "com/nokia/mid/m3d/M3D"
• M3D(N) - A library also called M3D [N here stands for new, M3D(N) itself is just a nickname] used in the latter budget phones. Most likely a newer version of M3D(O) It does have many files; however, "com/nokia/mid/m3d/M3D" isn't present there
• M3G - A newer version of M3D(N) used in the late Nokia phones such as Nokia X3. Also known as JSR184. Again, "com/nokia/mid/m3d/M3D" isn't present there

Here are some bits and pieces that can help run the game.

• M3D was greatly described in this scholar article. It is unknown if the topic is related to M3D(N) or M3D(O).

• M3D(N) is described on this documentation page, and

• M3G is described on this documentation page.

• M3D(O) is present in all builds of FreeJ2ME from May 29th, 2018, onward. Despite this, M3D(N) is nowhere to be found on the internet. The M3G library can be downloaded here

Running on a Phone

Many Discord members of the Lost Media Wiki community believe the found .jar executable can be run on physical phones. Although many of the non-touchscreen devices do run Java games very well, this game is certainly problematic primarily because, again, it uses the proprietary 3D engine class developed by Nokia. on which there is practically no information. In other words, to run this game, the phone is required to contain the "com/nokia/mid/m3d/M3D" class, which appears to have been used only on Nokia 3410. And to make things worse, a brief analysis of the Nokia 3410 firmware files available on the Internet shows that not every firmware of Nokia 3410 references this class, thus running this game may fail on even the game-native Nokia device. And the best example for this would be the Nokia 3410 SDK that fails to run this game although it natively emulates the Nokia 3410 firmware.

Gallery

In-Game Screenshots

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Videos

Emulated gameplay of the 1.06 version of the game.

Gameplay footage from a real Nokia 3410 phone.

A victory dance animation.

Emulated gameplay of the 1.0 version of the game.

External Links

• Nokia 3410 SDK (clean of viruses).
• Nokia 3410 MAME ROM.
• FreeJ2ME's SourceForge download page.