Years ago, I wrote a phoenix emulator. After some playing, it quickly
was placed together with old projects on my harddrive. Then some
months ago, I read the article by Graham Toal about static binary
translation. I found the phoenix emulator again, changed it abit, so
it translated phoenix into j2me code. There was several issues using
Grahams approach to port old arcade games, for instance there were
smart tricks to improve speed and size of the translated game (which
were needed since my cellphone was quite slow and had little memory).
However, the biggest problem for me was that I had to play phoenix
quite alot in order to translate all the code, infact I played it so
many times that I had lost interest before I uploaded the finished
translated game to my cellphone, and this was a 16kb game (if I
remember correctly). My initial idea was to use the technique to port
games from the early '90s, however some of the ones I wanted to port
was larger than 16kb, and based on the experiences from the phoenix
translation I felt that it was a very bad idea.

Here is an idea how to possibly solve this problem. playing through
phoenix time after time is exhausting for one person, but if 1000
people played it, each doing their part? Here is what to do; Write an
emulator-translator (the user will only see this as an emulator),
this emulator-translator should send the translated code to some
central server that will keep track of all the translated code. Based
on code on this server, we can translate the game to a smaller,
handheld device, without doing all the playing ourselves. As a bonus,
the finished translated game could be sent to all the players, as
some sort of reward.

What do you think about the idea?

jkm