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Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

56 points by diasks2 1y ago

I developed a game called "Putter King Adventure Golf" for iOS and Android back in the 2010s. It's long since disappeared from the app stores, but my son recently asked if he could play it, which got me thinking about whether it might be recoverable. I'm wondering if there's any way to find a copy of it somewhere on the web (I assume it was probably pirated at some point during its lifetime). And if I could find it, what would be the best approach to get it running again? Has anyone here successfully recovered and revived their old mobile apps? I'd appreciate any suggestions on: * Where to look for archived APKs or IPAs * How to sideload/run old mobile apps on modern devices * Whether emulators might be a viable option

torunar 1y ago
I found an Android version of your game on 4pda, Russian forum about devices and apps: https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=290300#entry10268026 https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=290300#entry102680...
- sandreas 1y ago
  Amazing! Now you need to find a device that can still run it :-)
  - vintermann 1y ago
    Probably safest to run it in an emulator with no internet access, given where it was found.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      APKs are signed so assuming OP can verify his own certificate he might be lucky enough to not have to dig that deep.
      - diggan 1y ago
        If it's being distributed by a piracy site, and the game had any sort of protection to make sure people actually bought it, then probably they're storing/offering a pre-cracked version, which certainly shouldn't (or wouldn't) be signed by anyone.
        mid-kid 1y ago
        This sort of protection is rather rare for android apps.
  - ImPrajyoth 1y ago
    Emulator with gen ai tool! That's it! Sanitize it then fix.
  - ok123456 1y ago
    jadx can probably disassemble it pretty thoroughly. I think you can give it the APK directly, or just unzip it and give it the classes.dex. Assuming everything goes smoothly, you could potentially resurrect a compilable project in about a man-week, or two, or three...
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    The Internet Archive already has some emulation support, perhaps Android support is needed? If OP is willing to transfer the copyright to the Archive for $1, I'm happy to facilitate so it has a permanent home. https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload (i have archived the APK in Wayback just in case the source in this thread disappears)
    - diasks2 1y ago
      That would be great. Is there a way I can reach out to you by email for more info? (my email is my hn username at gmail)
fastball 1y ago
Where did the source code go? I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about. So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot. Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?
  - sfn42 1y ago
    As far as software projects go I'd say GitHub or whatever VCS you prefer. For photos and documents etc you could look into cloud storage like OneDrive. A friend recently told me about filen.io which provides a similar service but with encryption. Not sure whether OneDrive also supports encryption.
    - mrweasel 1y ago
      I really want to store things locally though, and then just stick with cloud as backup. The problem is I also don't want to manage anything complex.
      - redundantly 1y ago
        If you have a NAS you can run Gogs as a container for a git repo.
        cmrx64 1y ago
        if you have a NAS you can just use a bare git directory as a remote
        1y ago
jimkleiber 1y ago
I'm not sure where to find the APKs/IPAs, but once you do, I wonder if using Claude Code or some other LLM tools could help you update the app (or reverse engineer) for modern OS versions. It's something that I've been thinking to do for my 2012 obsoleted microjournaling app.
- reactordev 1y ago
  They could, but then so can a lot of tools. At least with Android, it’s still Java so you can just emulate the runtime and run the app. To upgrade, just decompile the Java bytecode back into something editable. I had this same issue with one of my “long lost” games only, it wasn’t a mobile game but a console game, so Ghidra was my only hope.
- lihaciudaniel 1y ago
  [dead]
mkl 1y ago
Try searching this: "Putter King Adventure Golf" "apk" It brings up a few possibilities, many in other languages. Possibly these, but I haven't actually downloaded it and they seem a bit dodgy: https://www.dertz.in/games/download-Putter-King-Adventure-Golf-free-android-mobile-game-28364.htm https://www.dertz.in/games/download-Putter-King-Adventure-Go... https://apkpure.com/cn/putter-king/com.putterkingllc.putterking https://apkpure.com/cn/putter-king/com.putterkingllc.putterk...
mclau157 1y ago
The Tiger Woods PGA Tour game on IPhone in the 2010s was a full fledged PGA tour game with fun entirely 3D golf courses and a full career of tournaments and points to earn and spend, I consider the best full 3D game ever on IPhone and spent many hours playing it
- fidotron 1y ago
  That game was ahead of its time. My team worked on the post launch updates/ports of it, and because it was well optimized for the original dev target it was actually a bit of a pain! (The shadows especially). It was working on that which caused us to find a certain SoC supplier saying different things to different manufacturers.
r0ckarong 1y ago
You can use Android Studio (or other virtualization / emulation) to set up an older version of Android and then you use one of the various sites that "archive" games: https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/past-releases/as-2-3-0-release-notes https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/past-releases/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/54420/putter-king-adventure-golf/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/54420/putter-king-adventure-g... I've used Bluestacks to play the entire somewhat recent Monkey Island game on PC because I could not be bothered to play it on my phone but I have no idea how far back their versions go.
- Podrod 1y ago
  Why didn't you just play the PC version of Return to Monkey Island?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
    Available on GOG, DRM free, for years now.
- diasks2 1y ago
  Thanks! Looking into this. I found the apk file and I played around with Android Studio today but was having trouble getting the Nexus device with KittyKat or Lollipop to not crash when trying to open the device. Will keep trying different options.
  - RobRivera 1y ago
    Based Bluestacks
pikuseru 1y ago
How about making a new game with help from your son (even if it’s ideas) and making some new memories? ;-) The problem I found is that a lot of the stuff I made is tied to the hardware, OS and SDKs I used to make and run it (especially PalmOS and J2ME stuff - although Apple is just as bad.) Luckily I’ve been able to find an emulator called Cloudpilot Emu to run some of my old PalmOS games in the browser. I think if I was doing a game now and wanted to be able to look back on it in 10 to 20 years time I’d be doing it in C with SDL or JavaScript - although you’re betting on those being around. Or at least some virtual machine / runtime that could be ported to some new OS / platform.
- diasks2 1y ago
  Yeah! We did that yesterday. It was a lot of fun: https://go-monkey.vercel.app/ https://go-monkey.vercel.app/ It was what prompted him to ask about this game.
jmkni 1y ago
Considering the website is on your Github, are you sure the game code isn't there too in a private repo? https://github.com/diasks2/putterking https://github.com/diasks2/putterking
juris 1y ago
if you do find an .apk and didn't obfuscate it with proguard (I can't remember if proguard ran default in the release pipeline in Eclipse ADT...which...ew) you can use jadx to decompile your .apk and recover the structure of your source code! https://github.com/skylot/jadx https://github.com/skylot/jadx
claudiulodro 1y ago
As far as playing it, one of my kids uses BlueStacks[1] a lot to play old/beta/abandoned mobile games. It's like an emulator that lets you run mobile APKs on PC. That would be way easier than trying to find an old phone and actually playing it on a mobile device. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks
lihaciudaniel 1y ago
[dead]
felishiagreen12 1y ago
[dead]

gchadwick 1y ago

> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium. I've got years of random side projects and pretty much every photo I've taken going back many years. It's a complete mess, with various duplications, it's just not that big (few hundred GB maybe? I'm away from home so can't open up my NAS and look) so not worth my time to optimize it. On the flip side it's fun to randomly browse through and take a trip down memory lane. When there's a particular thing I definitely want can be more of a pain to find than if I had any decent organization but that comes up rarely enough that I don't really care.

diggan 1y ago
> Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium I've been doing that for most of my things too (except projects, they get categorized and more), just shuck it all into one big directory, worked perfectly well for 20+ years! And, since I punted organizing it for so many years, we now have LLMs, and I've ended up writing a tiny CLI that keeps an index of this disorganized pile, so while the pile itself is disorganized, thanks to LLM it was trivial to let it run for some days to categorize, tag and sort it all into an index. Another successful example of my life philosophy of "everything solves itself eventually".
gia_ferrari 1y ago
+1. My basic structure is a big share/ directory that is mounted on all my machines (over sshfs + tailscale if need be). There's some basic top-level organization (Projects, Financial Documents, Photos) but other than that, the key thing for me was a Projects/Active/, Projects/Ice/, Projects/Done folder that I move things between. If I don't know where to file a thing, I just make a new folder under Projects/Active/, keep an eye on your workflow, and reorganize if you see an issue. Stick to the process, not the plan[1]. The absolute worst approach I tried was to curate things. Nothing got filed. Embracing the chaos allowed the pattern to evolve around my revealed workflows, and now after a couple years I pretty much know where to instantly find or file things. [1] https://youtu.be/7D8sXR0ozeE?feature=shared&t=4474 https://youtu.be/7D8sXR0ozeE?feature=shared&t=4474