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.

Or so says this ad. Mac Rumors isn't sure what the deal is on this either, but this unofficial ad by Alec Sutherland, Anthony Hechanova, and Todd DosSantos is a neat little tribute to both New York and the gadget that's going to take over the world at the end of the month.

And forgive me if I'm reading a little too much into this, but how cool is all of this? It's 2007, and we're going to be walking around carrying little multitouch screens with "no buttons." Say what you will about the whole "Sweet Solution" fiasco, but dude-- we're living the future.

Mogopop is a content publishing community that publishes everything in an iPod-friendly format. From their own explanation: "Mogopop rolls your video, audio, pictures and text into a single piece of iPod content that anyone can download." Anyone can sign up to publish content, and while most items, AFAIK, are free to download, you need to use their Mogopop Manager software to manage the content on your iPod. To be clear, however: this Manager app works *with* iTunes, and does not interfere with your main library of music, videos and games.

Also of note at mogopop is a recently-released Macworld 07 Unofficial Guide, ripe for bringing along on everyone's favorite DAP just in case you don't snag enough maps, guides and directories at the Macworld event itself. The guide lists exhibitors, featured presentation schedules, keynote info, restaurants and - of course - obligatory speculation of what we might see released this year.

Some MacBook owners around the web are reporting a 'random shutdown' issue, where the machine will - as you might guess - seemingly shutdown at random; either during work or patiently idling for your next command. If you haven't experienced this issue yourself yet but are still concerned about it, The Apple Files has devised an unofficial test to see if you might be a victim.

The test involves entering a few simple commands into the Terminal and testing a few things over roughly half an hour of your time. Just to be thorough, the author recommends running this test two or three times to be sure, but it's really up to how paranoid you're feeling. Again, this is an unofficial test, and we haven't seen any official reports or announcements from Apple on this issue, its cause or how widespread it might be, but it's simply nice to have options, hey?

[via digg]