Before addressing the various questions in this thread, I want to tell the story of how me and kraze learned that
all three of my W51H phones, sadly, did NOT have the Before Crisis demo on it.
In order to access the EZ application (EZappli) menu, which includes games, you need a functioning SIM card (in this context called an "auIC" card). I spoke about this back in
February 2018 (though I made an error in which menu option was supposed to bring you to the game apps). In April 2019 I ordered two additional W51H phones and five months later in September 2019 they finally arrived. I then kind of forgot about them and never tested out the phones.
While speaking to kraze back in October 2020, they made me realize one of my newer phones actually had a functioning SIM card. I accessed the application menu...and confirmed that Before Crisis was not on there. It's deleted.
Compare the visuals at 0:16 with how the W51H manual (page 243) previews this application menu. The app menu on my phone is remarkably barren.
Discussions continued with kraze, who is very much a hardware expert familiar with obscure operating systems, and I sent them the two W51H phones in my possession that lacked SIM cards. The goal was to dump all the data, even though it required the destructiveness of picking the phones apart, and kraze accomplished this goal back in November.
The conclusion is that neither of the phones contain the Before Crisis demo. It is however, probably, mentioned by its filename.
kraze said:
I found data in the dump which looks like some kind of table. In this file the paths to preloaded applications are listed. And there is a section in the same place which lists the class ids (class ids are necessary to run the application in the BREW system). This data is present in both dumps. I think that these files are not present in the dump because e.g. the name bcfft_b31.mod is found only once in the dump, and it should be at least three times - in the file table, in the BREW signature file (.sig), and in this list of paths.
- kraze, 2020-11-16
The assumption here is that
bcfft_b31 might be short for "
Before
Crisis
Final
Fantasy
Trial" though admittedly this is only a reasonable guess at this point that this string refers to the Before Crisis demo.
-
Download link to dump of white W51H phone: Serial SHICK011611
With a basic hex editor you too can look up the reference to bcfft_b31.
The other phone contained personal data from its previous owner and so we will not share that dump. Both are the same in that the Before Crisis demo only appears as a text reference for the phone's table of contents, but without the actual game itself on there.
Some additional data presented by kraze in the context of these two phone dumps:
kraze said:
The [first] dump contains 8 megabytes worth of EZappli
...
your second device, as it contains, according to the filesystem information menu only 470k of EZappli data.
...
The class-id to launch [bcfft_b31] is 0x0103f23a.
Some technical info about the phone after kraze dissected it:
The CPU is Qualcomm MSM6550. The memory chip is an MCP (that is there is ROM and RAM stacked in one chip) Samsung KBP00W00DM. I could not find any datasheet on this chip. According to my research this is a 64 Mbyte ROM and unknown number of ram. Supposedly RAM is 32Mbytes, as the contemporary models in the West had this amount or less.
While it is exciting to have found a potential string reference to the Before Crisis Trial, the seeming lack of the actual application on any of my three W51H phones was disheartening. Thus I postponed sharing this story indefinitely, reasoning that I didn't want to update the thread with more dead-ends. But the recent activity in this thread motivated me to face my grief and actually share this story.
The lack of the Trial/Demo on these phones raises the question if there's more going on here than the past users manually clearing the EZappli folders or if perhaps the Before Crisis trial was programmed to self-destruct after a certain period of time. I know of no reference to such a self-deletion mechanic, but if
@The Twilight Mexican and
@Strangelove could browse the Japanese W51H manual at some point, to look for any details about how the phone treats "Trial" applications, I'd highly appreciate it.
-
W51H manual (no English version exists)
The pages that most obviously deal with the Before Crisis demo are pages 245 (number 245 on the pdf, number 243 on the actual image) and 255.
kraze's knowledge is immense and they are always learning new things as they dissect cell phones from all over the world and experiment with BREW-based technology.
Their YouTube channel is filled with videos of rare mobile games, some made playable on the Zeebo console. The prime example being how they've made
Kingdom Hearts V CAST partially playable on Zeebo (not a complete emulation).
Overall I find it difficult to return to the topic of these mid-2000s mobile games because most of the time it is a lesson in futility. That's why it's good when new blood enter the picture and revitalize the scene. Don't let my grumpiness get to y'all.
Always appreciate your investigations.
