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emulator posts

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, iPod touch

N64 emulator for jailbroken iPhones on the way?

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Nov 4th, 2009

There's an exciting announcement at All Tech Related this week that has us saying, "We can't wait!"

ZodTDD, the developer behind GpSPhone (a Nintendo Gameboy Advance emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch), announced the development of an N64 emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch. Zodttd believes that the current generation iPhone and iPod touch have the graphic CPU horsepower necessary to run those games. "...I can't promise it will run games top notch just yet, as things are too early to say. There's hope though, with a 3D accelerated graphics plugin, as well as an ARM dynarec."

As iPhone Savior points out, the toughest challenge could be fitting the controls onto the screen in an unobtrusive yet usable way. That was my main complaint about Resident Evil for iPhone [iTunes link] -- my hand is often in the way of what I'm trying to see.

Note that this will require an jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch.

[Via iPhone Savior]

Tags: 3g, 3gs, emulator, iphone, ipod touch, IpodTouch, jailbreak, n64, nintendo

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store

C64 emulator un-approved again

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Sep 8th, 2009

The first thing I thought when I saw that the C64 emulator we posted about the other day still had the BASIC interpreter hidden in it was, "Well that won't last." And unfortunately for fans of software emulation on the iPhone, I was right: the software got pulled from the App Store but quick. You can't really blame Apple here -- they've made it pretty clear that they don't actually want people running unlicensed, emulated code on the iPhone, so it's not hard to see why, when it was discovered you could still activate the interpreter, they cleared it out of the store.

The good news is that the emulator has been updated to delete the interpreter completely, and the owners of the software have resubmitted it yet again to the App Store. But as much as I enjoy seeing emulators on the iPhone (I've made it very clear I'd love to see an official NES arcade app), I can't say I'd blame Apple for just passing on this one outright. They've had to go through this app at least twice now, and especially since app approval is already taking so long, that's pretty much a waste of time. Mistakes like leaving the BASIC in the app (Edit: My mistake -- they intentionally left it in and hidden, with the expectation that Apple would later allow it. Doesn't seem very likely.) are making it much easier at this point for Apple to just say "no emulators, period," and move on. Hopefully this app will get re-approved, and that'll be the end of it.

Tags: app, app-store-approval, apple, approval, basic, c64, code, emulator, iphone

Filed under: Gaming, Multimedia, Software, Odds and ends, Apple, iPhone, App Store

C64 emulator approved for iPhone

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Sep 7th, 2009


Well how about that. A Commodore 64 emulator for iPhone is nothing new -- we covered the fact that one had been developed a little while ago. Here's what is new (and a little surprising, to be honest): Apple approved it. In an environment where Apple seems intent on rejecting anything that might encroach on their platform, even just a little bit, they have apparently allowed an emulator right there on the App Store.

There are catches, of course -- the emulator comes bundled with five officially licensed titles: Dragons Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck and Jack Attack, and more will be available to purchase soon, so it'll all be above board and legit (and the flip side is that if you want to play classic titles like Elite or Ultima, you'll have to hope that whoever owns the rights to those will let them see release). The biggest catch is that the emulator doesn't come with BASIC support enabled by default (although, via Daring Fireball and the iPhone Blog, it's possible to get to it via a backdoor), so it's more of a C64 arcade emulator rather than an actual software emulator.

But of course this is a step in the right direction -- someday we may finally see official SNES or NES emulators running in full glory on the iPhone and approved and available to purchase on the App Store. This emulator, simply called C64, is available right now on the App Store for $4.99.

Update: This app has been removed from the App Store because it was possible to enable the BASIC program. Look for it to return without that functionality.

Tags: app-store, app-store-approval, apple, approved, c64, dragons-den, elite, emulator, iphone, jack-attack, jupiter-lander, le-mans, software

Filed under: Cult of Mac, iPhone, Apple History

Classic Mac OS emulator for jailbroken iPhones

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Feb 22nd, 2009


Since the App Store launched, there hasn't been much that has really tempted me to jailbreak my iPhone. I don't think Mini vMac for iPhone actually will either, but just that fact that it exists at all is a trip for the nostalgic Macheads out there. Mini vMac is an open source Mac Plus emulator that has now been ported to the iPhone (a regular OS X version exists as well).

It emulates a 4MB Mac Plus; as the video above shows, it allows you to scroll to show the full display and even load Mac OS disk images and run classic Mac software. It's safe to say that this will never make to the App Store because it violates Apple's rules against emulators.

Mini vMac for iPhone requires a jailbroken iPhone, and can be loaded by adding the namedfork.net repository to the Cydia installer as described on the main page. You'll also have to round up a Mac Plus ROM image and disk images of any applications you want to run.

[via Gizmodo]

Tags: emulator, iPhone, jailbreak, Mac Plus, MacPlus, Mini vMac, MiniVmac

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Freeware, UNIX / BSD, Developer

CrossOver creates Chromium just to show they can do it

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Sep 16th, 2008

Mike Rose and I were chatting about this on the Talkcast a few weeks back -- virtualization and emulation programmers get all John Locke from Lost when you try to tell them what's not possible. And so when the guys at CrossOver heard that Google wasn't releasing Chrome for the Mac, they decided to put together a release themselves. CrossOver Chromium is a proof-of-concept release of the Chromium browser (which Chrome is built off of) that allows Google's base code to run on Mac and Linux platforms.

It's designed to show off just how well Wine works to bring Windows-based code to other platforms, and wake Google up to the fact that if they wanted to port Chrome over, they could. CrossOver says they did this to prove a point (and the point seems proven), but it's likely not only that Google wants to run the code natively, but that they wanted to focus on their largest audience first, which anyone can tell you is likely still the Windows crowd.

Even CrossOver says their version isn't ready for prime-time yet, they just wanted to show how fast it could be done. Let this be a lesson, Google: don't tell virtual software developers what they can't do.

Tags: chrome, chromium, crossover, emulator, google, proof-of-concept, virtualization, wine

Filed under: Software, iPhone

pTerm released, update due soon

by Giles Turnbull (RSS feed) on Aug 8th, 2008

pTerm window

Newly arrived in the App Store is pTerm, an iPhone port of the PuTTY terminal emulator. It supports SSH and Telnet, among other things, and has a built-in Control key.

But developer Eric Maland has been in touch with us to say that a 1.1 update is already on its way (it has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting approval). Unfortunately a handful of "major crashy bugs" (as Eric puts it) were discovered after the 1.0 release had been submitted.

Planned features for future releases include multiple simultaneous connections, custom sizes and colors, port forwarding and lots more. Details on the pTerm home page.

And in the meantime, if you download and experience crashy behavior, Eric's message is: be patient. The fixes are done, but when they reach the Store is out of his hands.

pTerm is $4.99US in the US App Store (We haven't seen it in the UK store).

Tags: emulator, pterm, terminal

Filed under: OS, Open Source, UNIX / BSD, Developer

Darwine 1.0

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Jun 19th, 2008

Firefox 3 was a pretty historic release this week, but I'd say that Wine 1.0 might actually beat it -- the open source non-emulator (Wine, after all, Is Not an Emulator) for Windows finally reached their first stable release. And Darwine, the OS X-rated version of Wine, also got a shiny 1.0 designation as well. It still won't work exactly perfectly (you've got to have XQuartz installed, and as with all emulators, there are so many different systems trying to talk to each other that you're bound to run into problems when one of them wants to do something complicated), but for standard Windows apps (Solitare and Spider Solitaire, we're told, work beautifully), it'll do ya.

Of course, we have no idea why you'd want to run anything Windows (ahem), but we won't judge. It's your computer: do what you like.

Thanks, Luigi193!

Tags: darwine, emulator, not-an-emulator, open-source, os-x, windows, wine

Filed under: iPod Family, OS, iPhone

StyleTap officially bringing Palm emulator to the iPhone / iPod touch

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on May 31st, 2008

Way back in February we posted on an experimental Palm emulator for the iPhone & iPod touch from StyleTap. At the time, they insisted that they were making no commitment whatsoever to release it as a product. Well, apparently they've gotten over their cold feet as StyleTap has announced their intention to bring StyleTap CrossPlatform to the iPhone and iPod touch. It will be available in "early July 2008" and more details will be released at that time.

I wonder if they delayed a bit too long. Obviously, they were waiting for iPhone 2.0, but with native software coming at the same time I wonder how much Palm software people will want. That said, there is a huge catalog of Palm software out there and having come from a Treo I can think of several applications (especially finance related) that I would love to have on my iPhone. What do you think; is there any Palm software out there you really want running on your iPhone?

[via iPhone Alley]

Tags: emulation, emulator, iPhone, iPod touch, IpodTouch, Palm

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Freeware, Developer, iPhone

temper4iPhone emulates Turbografx-16 on the iPhone

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on May 28th, 2008

The guys at Touch Arcade are at it again -- this time, ZodTTD has ported temper, a TurboGrafx-16 emulator, to the iPhone, and as you can see above, this means something amazing: Bonk on the touchscreen. Sounds like the audio has a few little glitches, but seems like the controls and graphics are working as well as could be asked -- even in the slower Landscape mode (with the controls overlaid on the graphics), he says it was pulling about 50FPS.

There's even an emulator for the TurboGrafx-16 CD PC Engine, as long as you do a little tweaking (and nab the bios from somewhere that may or may not be legal -- same for the ROMs). temper4iPhone is still in beta, and just like all of these other emulators and jailbreak apps, we have no clue at all whether we'll ever get the chance to see them on the (rapidly approaching) App Store. Still, it's awesome to see -- we've definitely come a long way from the NES emulator way back when.

[Via MacBytes.com]

Tags: app-store, bonk, cd, emulator, games, gaming, graphics, iphone, pc-engine, turbografx16, zodttd

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Multimedia, Apple, iPhone

PSX emulator goes public, runs 3D on the iPhone surprisingly well

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Dec 24th, 2007


This is why I'm looking forward to 2008 more than anything else-- MacNN reports that psx4iphone, the Playstation (PS1 or PSX) emulator for the iPhone has now gone public. The files are available for download, and we're told that the emulator should be available on Installer.app soon (if not already-- this news dropped over the weekend).

There's no official word about playability (as you can tell from the video above, it is running, but not in a state where you could actually play it), but work is still being done. What this does tell us, fortunately, is that it's possible to run 3D on the iPhone. And as MacNN says, that means there are big things ahead when the official SDK drops in February. Of course, we still don't know what the dev kit will be made of (and who will get to use it), but if this is what can be done unofficially, I can't wait to see what will be done with an official SDK.

[Via MacNN]

Tags: emulator, iphone, psx, psx4iphone, sdk

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Multimedia, Odds and ends, iPhone

iPhone MAME project launched

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Aug 20th, 2007

I'm pretty sure that, with this link, we've hit all the basic retrogaming points for the iPhone (wait-- can I play Nethack on it yet?). Yes, iphone-sdl-mame aims to bring all of your MAME favorites to Apple's latest endeavor. Like all of the other projects we've covered, it's open source, unofficial (duh), and a work in progress. From the text, kaisersoze (who's heading up this go) says PacMan and Q*Bert will run, but other games are too slow to be playable at the moment. And there's no word on whether control of anything is working yet or not.

So it's a super early build-- all there is at the moment is just a few files in the subversion repository, so if you're looking to just install a file and get rolling, not so fast. But as with all of these open source iPhone hacks, attention seems to equal progress, so there you go. Hopefully, now that the word's out, playing Galaga at full speed on the iPhone is just around the corner.

Oh and if you don't have an iPhone yet, worry not-- MacMAME's got you covered.

[ via Waxy ]

Tags: coding, emulator, games, iphone, mame, nethack, opensource, playable, slow

Filed under: Gaming, Hacks, Odds and ends, iPhone

NES emulator on the iPhone

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Aug 6th, 2007


Wow-- something I've noticed after my little vacation last week is that the iPhone application community is at a full sprint (no pun intended) on making applications. When I left, people were dropping Hello World, and now we're up to the evolutionary step of NES emulator. By this time next week, we'll have a screenshot grabber (oh wait, we've already got that-- guess it's time to go for Open Office).

Wily programmer "stepwhite" has brought the InfoNES core onto the iPhone, along with Mario, Zelda, and all your favorite NES roms. As you can see, it's not quite done-- the emulator runs too slowly to be playable, and the controls are implemented with an actual controller image which, as the programmer says, "...while cute, sucks."

I don't know if theres any way to save states, either. Not a problem for Super Mario Bros., but Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy might be a little long to have all in one go. But it is awesome, and just amazing that we've already gotten to this level on the iPhone. At this rate, we may not even need an SDK.

Thanks, Karl!

Tags: emulator, iphone, iphonehacking, nes, sdk, supermariobros, zelda

Filed under: OS, Software, Universal Binary

Emulate Windows with Q

by C.K. Sample, III (RSS feed) on Feb 17th, 2006

I just downloaded and installed Q on my iMac Core Duo. I tried importing my Windows 2000 Virtual PC 7 image from an old backup disk, and it imported, but keeps crashing at startup. However, this discussion over at Accelerate Your Macintosh has me hopeful that Q just may be the future of free Windows emulation on the Mac. According to the Q site, "Run Windows, Linux and a lot more Systems on your Mac. Q is a feature packed cocoa port of QEMU: Switch fast between guest PCs. Save and restart guest PCs at any stage. Easily exchange Files between Host and Guest. Q makes use of OS X most advanced technologies like openGL and coreaudio to accelerate your experience with your guest PC."

This program is still in development, but they have a Universal Binary. Later on today, when I have some free hours (ha!), I think I'll try to build an image from scratch and install XP. I'll report back after the weekend with my findings.

Tags: emulator, Q, universal binary, windows

Filed under: Hardware, Portables, Other Events

The Newton OS on non-Apple hardware

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Jan 15th, 2006

The big news out of the Worldwide Newton Conference this weekend is that Paul Guyot has successfully gotten the Newton OS up and running on a Sharp Zaurus. This emulation project is called "Einstein," and a beta is available for download today. If you have a Linux-based PDA with X11 support, you can run the Newton OS! You can view the slides from Paul's presentation online [link:PDF]

As Steve said, the soul of the Macintosh is not the hardware used to run it, but in the software. The same is true of the Newt. The project is still very much a beta, so don't expect your Sharp to function just as your 2100 does. Still, this is quite a feat. Well done, Paul!

[Via Tow.com]

Tags: einstein, emulator, newton, sharp, worldwide newton conference, WorldwideNewtonConference

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Cult of Mac

A treasure trove of classic Mac games

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Jun 20th, 2005

se30This weekend I was reading Mr. Barrett's site (a Mac tech who has helped me out of more than a couple of jams) when I saw his link to this fantastic collection of classic Mac games. I wasted a good deal of the early 1990's playing SimCity, The Fool's Errand and of course, Maelstrom. This was back when System 7.6 was all the rage and everyone was in awe of the one SE/30 we had at work.

So, go and dust off that 4400 you have in the basement (or pick up an emulator, as Mr. Barrett suggests) and have some old school fun.

[Via Mr. Barrett]

Tags: clasic, emulator, gaming, vintage

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