Porting software to your phone?

[Guest happytang]

Hmm... I would have to say that my programming skills are barely even close to par, but this question has been bothering me for some time now.

Just as people do with emulators, they seem to port the an original emulators gaming engine to use with their code on the smartphone.

What exactly does one have to do to port something to the smartphone.

For example, what did the german guy have to do to release the hacked 2003 rom (which I know was probably stolen) but the fact that it's unstable shows that he modified it in some way. Wouldn't it be possible then to go ahead and download (let's just imagine) the 2005 OS installer, then upgrade the 2002 OS with that one?

Take notice of my MPX-200.

Here's another thing I'd like to add. After looking around for what would seem to be any UPDATE at all for my MPX-200. I stumbled across an upgrade for the Samsung i600 to 2003. Can any developer answer my question as to what exactly is the problem between the coding in a install program for the i600 than one for the MPX-200 or any other phone?

Edited May 11, 2005 by happytang

[Guest homestaruk]

I would imagine quite a lot of it is to do with the hardware capabilities of the device and whether or not the device manufacturer has chosen to license the new OS for use on their products (from Microsoft). For example, the samsung device may have hardware which is capable of running the new OS, and the bootloader may be able to load the new OS on from a USB cable. However, the fact that they are offering a free upgrade to their existing customers indicates that they are willing to invest in a new license to distribute the new version of the OS, and also invest the money in customising the product for their device.

The difference between this and the so called "hacked" german version is that whereas the OS will have been customised by the manufacturer for their particular device, and supplied in the format to the manufacturer which makes it very easy for them to customise it, the "hacked" version will have been an existing pre-compiled rom image from which the german decompiled and then removed customisations from... obviously with a detremental result on the overall stability of the recompiled OS.

I hope this helps.

Dean