We have been playing with MPowerPlayer for a while now, but up until now, we haven’t been able to get it to run SORA. SORA would crash immediately with a NullPointerException that was coming from deep in the bowels of MPowerPlayer’s j2me implementation itself.

Last week, though, Nate finally got it working, after some hard core investigation, and a bit of forum searching. It turned out to be a difference in a particular aspect of the ClassLoader security implementation within MPowerPlayer. It also turns out that their implementation is not only legitimate, but probably more secure in this aspect that every other implementation we have test with. Luckily the fix was relatively simple, and compatible with the existing devices that we support.

Nate implemented the fix, and we’ve got SORA running in MPowerPlayer now. So I have to give some serious props to Nate for getting this working, and to the MPowerPlayer developers for a such a cool tool, and for good support on their forums.

Besides just being cool, MPowerPlayer gives us a great in-house tool for testing. Because it is so much easier to setup and use than other emulators, and is not Windows specific (Tomo is mostly OS X these days!), we can easily set it up, for example, for a game designer or graphic artist to use in testing gameplay and game content.

Now if we can just figure out how to best utilize all those bloomin’ configuration parameters.