I've recently gotten back into Megami Tensei and I was wondering if I could make a dungeon crawler in PICO-8. I then remembered that I am not very confident in my pixel art, and wanted to base it off Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it on the Spriters Resource, so I was stumped. Sure I could go for the NES version's style, but I liked the aspect ratio of those J2ME phones (and it fits better with a square aspect ratio w/o affecting artistic vision because CRTs). Sometime, deep in the depths of last year, I downloaded the English translation of the Chinese version and played it a little bit, and then gave up. Oh well. But hey! Somewhere on my computer is a J2ME program that has the assets in it! And surely my emulator can tell me where to find the files! However, my Downloads folder is quite evil (it's all my fault actually, and this goddamn computer is over 10 years old,) and I would have to manually search for the emulator. I decided to document my process.
Pre-Statement: I once tried to install MAME, but I accidentally installed it in my \downloads\ directory, so theres a lot of weirdly named folders. I'll save you all from whatever those are.
The folder contains 3 files: a .exe labeled "setup.exe", and 2 .zip files. I clicked on setup, and it turned out to be the installer for Melty Blood Re:Act, from when I tried to get into that. No Megaten.
Once again, there are 3 files. One was a .png, so I looked at it. One of the other files is a .jar, and based on the aesthetic of the .png, I conclude that it is a program for Processing Java.
Howerver, upon looking further, it was not exactly what I thought it was. Although it is probably a Processing program, I first thought that it was for when I was messing around with first person camera in Processing (wayyy harder (for me at least) than with p5), but after checking the README.txt, I now know that it is a proof-of-concept for a first person danmaku. After traveling through those tunnels in the Labrynth of Amala, I am a bit more hesitant with this idea than when I first was obsessed with the concept. However, this README seems to solve the problems of a limited vision cone. Maybe I'll have to try it out.
The "vint" implied vintage, so I wasn't actually sure that this was what I was looking for. It wasn't TvT. Turns out it was for a soundfont for various vintage drum machines. I actually like using this soundfont in OpenMPT. Vintage is definitely the accurate descriptor, because the readme recommends you visit the developer's Geocities. Ironic.
I found it! This was the emulator I was looking for! It had everything as I remember it (although that really shouldn't be a shocker.) I honestly thought I would have had to look deeper. I didn't realize it just from spelling, but Kahvi is supposed to sound like Coffee, like Java. The main thing on my mind is: where the hell did I find this!?!?! Everytime I look up "J2ME emulator" I get many results, none of which are this. I think what may have happened is that I looked up "Java Phone Emulator"--or something of the sort--and found this instead, which, really, is a great result, because it comes bundled with hundreds of games. This also means I can try and take a look at the Megami Tensei .jar!
The next thing I had to do was actually find the .jar. Unfortunately, Kahvibreak doesn't have a "show in games folder" button, and Windows Explorer is ass at searching things. Luckily, "Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei", the game's full title, is relatively high up in the alphabet, so this shouldn't be so hard, right? Wrong. 30 seconds in, I decide to try and sort by last modified. Apperantly, Kavhibreak had Megaten already installed, and I wasn't the last to put it there. And also, whats that at the top of the list, "kemulator.cfg"... "kemulator"... like the emulator that was literally the first thing I found when searching this?!? Whatever. I tried searching date ascending, but this yielded no immediate results, so I gave up on that too.
Once I reached the "D" games, I decided to check if maybe it started with "DDS", but this was not the case. Quickly I got to "Di" and... "Digdug.jar", "DIGDUGDeluxe.jar", "DigitsME.jar", but no "Digital Devil Story", so it must be under "Megami Tensei". Oh boy. I gave up using my mouses scroll wheel and just used the scrollbar. I honestly thought this would be more of a pain in the ass than it was. Anyways I pretty quickly found "MegamiTensei-ENG.jar". I opened the file in WinRAR and extracted it into my downloads folder.
At this point, I knew I wasn't going to get exactly what I was looking for. Kahvibreak has a little preview window about the game and I saw it was different than I imagined. I still wanted to see what's inside though.
Yep, that sure is Megami Tensei for Java phones, exactly as how I saw it in Marsh's video. Interestingly, Nakajima's and Yumiko's portraits are titled "boy.png" and "girl.png" respectively. Other than that, theres really nothing out of the ordinary.
The Reddit post I opened a few minutes ago to look for different J2ME emulators mentions "Kahvi break", but when I type "Kahvi" in to the search bar, it shows that I specifically typed out "Bluemaximas Kahvibreak", and it also shows the link to the developers website, from which I presumably downloaded this. Theres a non-zero chance I just found this from just a different Reddit post, and knowing me, I definitely did. I might have also seen it on a video about J2ME games, as I vaguely recall watching another video about this, but maybe it was just that Decino made a video about the DOOM rpg
Upon looking at more of his website, he is really into preservation, also having archives of Newgrounds flash animations, text-based adventure games, and pre-Studio GameMaker games.
Marsh's Mobile Megami Tensei video. I love his youtube channel, and you should definitely check out his stuff.I checked, and Decino doesn't have a video on the DOOM rpg. There are videos about that though, but none I had seemed to watch.