| ▲ | Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s? |
| 25 points by diasks2 a day ago | 18 comments |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | r0ckarong 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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/...
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. |
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| ▲ | torunar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I found an Android version of your game on 4pda, Russian forum about devices and apps: https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=290300#entry102680... |
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| ▲ | sandreas 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Amazing! Now you need to find a device that can still run it :-) | | |
| ▲ | vintermann an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Probably safest to run it in an emulator with no internet access, given where it was found. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 an hour ago | parent [-] | | APKs are signed so assuming OP can verify his own certificate he might be lucky enough to not have to dig that deep. |
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| ▲ | ok123456 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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... | |
| ▲ | ImPrajyoth an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Emulator with gen ai tool!
That's it! Sanitize it then fix. |
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| ▲ | mkl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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-Go... https://apkpure.com/cn/putter-king/com.putterkingllc.putterk... |
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| ▲ | fastball an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mrweasel an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | gchadwick 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | sfn42 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | mclau157 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | fidotron 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jimkleiber an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
