Writing Tetris for your Mobile Phone

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Writing Tetris for your Mobile Phone

• Professor Simon M. Lucas
• School of Computer Science and Electronic
  Engineering

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Mobile (Cell) Phones

• First prototype Motorola 1973
• Commercial cell phones
• NTT Japan 1979
• Scandinavia 1981
• Motorola, US, 1983
• DynaTAC 8000X (4,000)
• Subscribers
• 300,000 in 1984
• Over 3,000,000,000 now!
• So much more than just a telephone!

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EA Mobile UK Chart (Dec 9th 2009)
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Tetris

• Developed by Alexei Pajitnov in 1985
• With the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim
  Gerasimov
• Popular in the west in 1986
• The classic casual game of all time
• Hundreds of derivatives

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Tetris and JavaWORA Write Once, Run Anywhere?
Except the iPhone!
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Run Demo
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Suns Wireless Toolkit
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Developing Mobile Apps

• Write Java for cut-down mobile platform
• Simple (older) version of the Java Language (1.3)
• Using suitable libraries (e.g. no standard I/O)
• Test code on emulator
• Package into a .jar file
• Copy to mobile phone
• OTA deployment also possible
• (Over The Air)

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Software Design
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Divide and Conquer
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Modelling Tetris
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Tetris in UML(Unified Modelling Language)
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And into Java Code

• Controller
• Main loop event handling
• View
• Only concerned with display of game objects
• Model
• Game model
• Shape model

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Main Loop (Controller)
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Event Handling
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Sample MSc Student Project
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Summary

• Mobile phones incredible technology
• RF, hardware, telecomms, software
• Programming should be (and is!) lots of fun
• Javas a great language
• Modern IDEs take the pain out of software
  development
• Study computing and electronics be part of a
  bright future!
• Download free Tetris (in Java) for your phone
• Google Simon Lucas Tetris
• Modify and improve the gameplay!