When it comes to video game preservation, NTT DoCoMo's popular Japanese feature phone service i-mode has often been overlooked. That's in spite of famous Japanese companies like Capcom, Enix, Konami, Namco, and more having published high-quality games & applications for the platform.
This mostly comes down to a general lack of awareness among gamers about the service's existence as well as the platform's overzealous copy protection that has traditionally caused headaches for anyone trying to preserve the software outside of the portal.
Recently, however, RockmanCosmo, a Mega Man fan and video game preservationist, shared an exciting update about these ongoing efforts, revealing that 9 commercial i-mode games have now been saved, thanks to two recent breakthroughs.
These breakthroughs came courtesy of the user /bin/cat/, who managed to successfully decrypt a commercial i-mode game Fly Height Cloudia, and another individual named MemoryHunter who converted the Java files from PlayStation Mobile's Appli Archives collection and turned them into a playable format for the DoJa emulator SDK.
You can check out RockmanCosmo's thread below for more information:
If you want to stay up to date with the progress, we also recommend giving Rockman Cosmo a follow or checking out their website Rockman Cosmo's Corner to see more of their preservation work