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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that, with this link, we've hit all the basicretrogamingpoints 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.
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.
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.
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!
This 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.
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.
Way back in February we 
I'm pretty sure that, with this link, we've hit all the 
I just
downloaded and installed 
The big news
out of the 
This weekend I was reading 
