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.

An employee of Cyan Worlds (proprietors of the legendary Myst series of games) has announced that they will be porting the original Myst to the iPhone. Apparently it's an "outside-funded" project -- though who might be funding it isn't yet clear -- and is apparently proving to be an "interesting and fun" project with a small team of just three people. No word yet on how it might work (or work differently) from the original, but the classic puzzle/exploration of Myst is good gaming no matter what platform you're playing it on.

Starting with the NES emulator, the iPhone was following the evolution of gaming pretty well -- at least until the App Store started mixing things up a bit. After Myst, I think we're right around Wolfenstein and Doom at this point -- those were available jailbroken, but it's about time we get an FPS officially as well. Carmack, you interested?

[via TouchArcade, which is strangely down as of this writing]

Here's a neat little hack with some retro gaming chic. A clever modder has basically stuffed the guts of an Apple Remote into an old NES controller sans cable. He's got step-by-step instructions if you want to make your very own very Mario-friendly Front Row / Apple TV controller. Personally, I'd love to leave one of these sitting on my coffee table.

[via Gizmodo]

NerveGas, the developer who forked "StepWhite"'s iPhoneNES program from StepWhite's proof-of-concept version 0.01 to actual playable product, has announced Released Candidate 1 for his NES emulator.

The emulator, which uses a modified version of the InfoNES emulation core, is a separate development effort and should not be confused with the original Google Code iPhoneNES project. StepWhite's original code has been removed from NES.app and replaced.

NES.app includes Game Genie, saved games, sound, and battery ram support. It provides both landscape and portrait gameplay and uses multitouch to allow you to access more than one game control at a time.

Version 0.99.00 is hosted at and can be downloaded as a binary release and SVN source ( svn checkout http://svn.natetrue.com/nesapp).

NerveGas has released his code under the GPL. Since NES.app uses the iPhone's proprietary APIs, you may want to scope out the code to pick up some iPhone programming tricks.

So what happens when someone releases a functional but extremely slow NES emulator? Two of the finest iPhone hackers spend all night re-writing the thing to make it blazing fast and include multi-touch support. Behold the optimized NES App created by NerveGas with help from NightWatch/Patrick Walton. You can download and run the app today and the source will shortly be rolled into the official SVN. iPhone NES: the game for big hearts and small thumbs.

Thanks to Bricolage and NerveGas

Update: The NES App has been getting updates all day. To keep on top of the updates, check out Nate True's iPhone archive, which is where new updates will appear.

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!

Our sister blog Engadget found this pretty dang cool iPod hack. Somebody has hooked up an old NES controller for use with an iPod Photo to play Doom. As you can see on the original site, this involved adding a USB port to the bottom of his iPod to which the controller connects. And of course the software is courtesy of the iPod Linux folks (which we've mentioned before). Before you break out that soldering iron, make sure your iPod is supported.

[Via Endgadget]

First it was Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, and now the enterprising geeks at the iPod Linux project have written a NES emulator for the iPod. So far, Megaman, Spiderman, Skate Or Die and Guerilla War work fine, while Tetris, Super Mario Brothers and a few others are still a bit crash-tastic.

If you've got the skills (and free time), why not lend these folks a hand in getting a few more games up and running. And before you ask "why," let me provide you with the answer: Because we can.

This is an impressive mod. Brent Housen's friend has taken a Mac mini, gutted it, and reassembled it inside an 'old school' (as the kids say) NES. The power button on the NES puts the Mac mini to sleep, and the Reset button ejects the CD tray. Pretty sweet, I just hope you don't have to blow on the CD's repeatedly to get them to work.

[via Joystiq]