GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

by wpeng • 13 years ago

75 55 13 years ago

sksksk• 13 years ago

Pretty cool idea, the no jailbreak thing, while true, is a bit disingenuous though, since you need your own developer account.

What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app? Surely it's against their TOS?

SpikedCola• 13 years ago

Are you sure you need a dev account? I haven't tried it (yet), but the page claims: "No jailbreak OR developer account required :)"

idunno2462• 13 years ago

They're using MacBuildServer, which provisions it with its own enterprise account, which is against ToS and I would expect macbuildserver's public provisioning to get shut down and the profile revoked

mikestew2• 13 years ago

"What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app?"

I'm going to guess the chances are near zero. Picture the lurking possibility that Apple revokes your developer key, essentially shutting down your business, because you merely built something on your own hardware that they didn't like. You didn't distribute it, the code never left your network, you just built it. I feel that every argument for "developers will never leave iOS even if Apple does..." goes out the window at that point.

mikehotel3• 13 years ago

MacBuildServer is distributing the .ipa files they have inhouse signed to anyone that wants it. Apple would only revoke the certs used to sign apps that are distributed outside that assigned enterprise.

megablast• 13 years ago

Apple revokes dev keys all the time for a lot less.

marban• 13 years ago

Without external controller support (and hardware) these projects are all just proof of concept. That is, in this case you're still better of with an Android device and a controller via OTG/BT.

footpath• 13 years ago

iOS 7 is getting official external game controller APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameCo...

So there's a future for that.

DerekL• 13 years ago

You could also use an iCade or some other controller that uses the iCade protocol.

djent3• 13 years ago

This is really cool. I found that the game music was a little laggy/skippy while playing Pokemon Sapphire, but that's really no issue for me.

lobotryas• 13 years ago

Same while trying out FF6. Also the graphics would sometimes be slow to redraw (ex: during cutscenes).

Overall I love what this team has done, playing these old games on my phono feels downright like magic. It's a shame that Nintendo won't bring these games officially to mobile platforms.

mikeweiss• 13 years ago

Its always amazed me that Nintendo hasn't cashed in yet on creating an official emulator for iPhone/Andriod and releasing thier huge collection of old games in an official marketplace for people to download.... there is no doubt how popular that would be. Everyone would be playing pokemon again.

prawks• 13 years ago

It would mean more or less an exit to Nintendo's hardware business.

Plus, they're sitting on piles of money, so they're not exactly in a hurry.

djent3• 13 years ago

There would probably be legal issues with people who had already bought the games in their original cartridge form who don't feel they should have to pay for the game again. It would also stop at Gameboy Advance games, because it becomes increasingly hard to fit two screens worth of content onto an iPhone screen with the necessary buttons and directional pad.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

The first one isn't a problem for ninty: you aren't perpetually entitled to new releases because you bought one copy on one medium. You don't get a DVD because you blight Snow White on VHS, and you really don't have standing to torrent it either.

MBCook• 13 years ago

Ignoring the obvious legal issues of 3rd party games, Nintendo seems to strongly believe that it's back catalog is worth quite a bit of money and seems to steadfastly against doing anything that may devalue it. They seem to prefer to sell 5k copies of an old game at $5-10 each than 200k copies at $2 on a platform they don't control.

It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.

GuiA• 13 years ago

It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues.

Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms.

This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms.

So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)

frozenport• 13 years ago

I also have trouble understanding this, perhaps they fear market cannibalism? For example old Pokemon taking money from new Pokemon?

glhaynes2• 13 years ago

Most likely they're afraid of old Pokemon keeping people from buying new Pokemon on a new 3DS, a new 3DS that would have led to other 3DS game sales.

millerm• 13 years ago

I'd never seen MacBuildServer.com until just now but they completely violate the terms of service with Apple. They are using their enterprise development certificate to bypass the AppStore. They won't be around long.

0x0• 13 years ago

I wonder how they deal with the possibility that a github xcode project build file can run arbitrary code... What if someone submits a project to build that spawns a reverse shell and then trojanizes the build server for later builds? I wouldn't trust any ipa coming out of that machine.

TheMakeA• 13 years ago

There are a number of options. For instance, each build could run on a freshly provisioned virtual machine (like Travis CI), or using a carefully crafted sandbox-exec setup.

benguild• 13 years ago

I had this create duplicate icons on my homescreen, which sucks since even after uninstalling the App and certificate, the additional one is still there. :(

nathan_f77• 13 years ago

Had the same problem. Restarting your phone should work. (Or if you're phone is jailbroken, you could just touch 'Respring' in SBSettings.)

pearjuice3• 13 years ago

Isn't it illegal to spread any Gameboy BIOS image?

lcampbell• 13 years ago

The GBA doesn't have a BIOS; you're thinking of ROMs (effectively, the cartridge contents dumped to a file). ROMs are covered by copyright, and are indeed illegal to distribute without authorized consent (which Nintendo would never give). However, there are homebrew ROMs you can legally download and distribute. No emulator I know of, including this one, illegally ships with (or describes how to illegally obtain) copyright-protected ROMs.

DrewRWx• 13 years ago

The GBA does in fact have a bios, but modern emulators do not require it except for some rare edge cases that their reverse engineered bios can't handle.

evanmoran• 13 years ago

There seems to be a SNES version as well by the same author. Really amazing the community around this.

https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS

pdknsk• 13 years ago

Why would anyone want to play those games with such poor controls? The person who made this does obviously not like games, but coding, which is fair enough.

stevenleeg• 13 years ago

Lighten up, man. You don't need to shit on everything just for the sake of shitting on it.

GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

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