Gizmodo recently posted this video, which is beautiful to any PSX-era gamers: it's Final Fantasy VII running right on the iPhone, like buttah thanks to the 3GS hardware. How is this possible? Through the magic of emulation -- ever since computers got powerful enough to pretend to be other computers, people have resurrected old consoles and hardware by writing code that makes old games and software think its right at home in the computer it belongs in (an old NES system, a Genesis, or even a Playstation or Nintendo 64). As a result, by loading up ROMs into an emulator program, you can play old games you can't find (at least working) in the store any more.

But the problem, as it usually does, lies in the legality. Even though those games are hard to find, companies still often own the copyrights on them (Square, for example, just released FFVII in an official emulator on the PSP, and they wouldn't be very happy with someone else releasing it on the iPhone). So while it's very easy for someone to write software that pretends to be an old NES (and there are lots of jailbroken apps around that will do just that), it's not easy to get all the rights and legal sign-offs to make it legit. Legit enough for Apple to keep it in the App Store, anyway. And while the video Gizmodo shows is awesome, and is possible on a jailbroken phone, it's not likely we'll ever see that app make it through Apple's approval. Not to mention that even when people jump through the legal hoops, Apple isn't happy with running other systems' code on their hardware anyway. Lame.

That doesn't mean that the old games are gone forever -- there are certainly emulators of open-sourced or expired hardware on the App Store (here's one for Chip-8), and obviously there's a commercial reason for companies who do own the copyrights on popular games to bring them into the App Store officially. But as great as it would be to have a GBA emulator that automatically played any GBA game ROMs you loaded into it, that kind of stuff will have to stay in the jailbreak underground for now.

This seems like bad news for Apple, to say the least. A few Chinese websites are now selling $200 gift certficates to iTunes for less than a few bucks, which means that it's likely hackers have figured out the algorithm to determine gift codes on Apple's music store. As with most online codes, iTunes gift certificate numbers are generated by a formula somewhere -- figure out the formula, and you can generate your own codes (though it's of course tough to do and highly illegal).

The good news is that this might be an easy fix for Apple: they'll just have to re-figure the formula. The tougher thing to do will be to determine which of the old codes to honor -- they'll want to make sure to approve all of the cards on the shelves at Best Buy right now, while still trying to catch all of the illegal codes generated by hackers.

But then again, we're talking about a digital store that's already making cash hand over fist. Maybe even if one hacker on a shady website has figured out how to generate iTunes codes, Apple isn't too concerned about losing a few thousand dollars when they're still selling millions of dollars worth of music and content legitimately.

You know why DRM sucks? Because it makes it possible for Apple to do naughty things like change the ways you can use your iTunes Music Store tunes after you've purchased the songs / videos. If you didn't know about it, you should really take a long read of the iTMS Terms of Service. It looks like someone in Norway has noticed and found it to be supremely problematic: "The Consumer Council of Norway find the terms to be unbalanced and highly in favour of iTunes as one party in the entered agreement. . . . The consumer is granted few or no rights while iTunes provides itself with several unfair rights according to Waterhouse."

So now, the TOS is up for review. I'd like to think Norway will slap iTunes down and it will lead to a loosening of the TOS across the globe, but considering how Apple's current poor support of Europe lags behind support in the U.S., I seriously doubt that Steve Jobs is very concerned by this review.