First off, big thanks to that guy who made that J2ME book that I reviewed a few weeks back. It's getting a lot of use here around the. . .job (it's still difficult to say).

Yep, I'm writing a game for a cellphone. Should be fun. Not a huge challenge, but a lot of stuff I haven't used before. Hopefully we can all teach ourselves a thing or two about how to write games.

I'm still reeling from the whole development tools issue. In order to develop for J2ME, a reasonable installation includes Java 1.4, the J2ME/MIDP toolkit, ANT (make.exe on steroids), and a platform-specific toolkit (Nokia in this case).

That's a total of 182.4 meg of tools to install, and that doesn't even include an IDE or debugger.

182.4 megabytes of software must be installed so that you can write games for a machine that's got approximately the computing horsepower and memory of a circa 1984 TRS-80.

Sheesh. I remember when Turbo Pascal 4.0 was released and it required TWO 360k floppy disks --one for the app and one for your code. And we thought that was a pain.

Anyway, I'll stop now because I'm starting to sound like a crochety old man sitting on the porch and waxing on about them Good Old Days(tm) when men were men and polio built character and them "whites only" signs over water fountains was for the common good.