Adam Kos It's quite interesting to see how our iPhones manage what the computers of the last decade slowly couldn't. But if we look further, there were also many consoles on the market with many popular games. Retro games are still popular today and the App Store is full of them. But if you wanted to emulate these titles on iPhones, you will encounter.
An emulator is typically a program that imitates another program. For example, a PSP emulator of course emulates a PSP and can also play compatible games for that console on the device it's running on. But this is just a program optimizing your device. The other half of the emulators are the so-called ROMs. In this case, it is the version of the game that is necessary to play it. So you can think of an emulator as a digital console, while a ROM is a digital game.
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Vratislav Holub More problems than benefits
And as you can imagine, here is the first stumbling block. So the emulator might not bother Apple that much, but the fact that it allows you to play titles available from a source other than the App Store is already against its terms. Even if these titles were free, this is an alternative distribution channel that does not go through the App Store, so it has no place on iPhones or iPads.
The second problem is that while the emulators themselves are actually legal, the ROMs, or programs and games, are often illegal copies, so downloading and using them actually makes you a pirate. Of course, not all content is bound by some legal restrictions, but it is very likely. If you want to avoid possible piracy to a certain extent, you should only download the ROMs of games that you own on a console and of course not distribute it in any way. Doing otherwise simply violates intellectual property laws.
So, in order to emulate old games on iOS and iPadOS devices, you can undergo a jailbreak, a software unlocking of the device, which will give you many benefits, but also many risks. Since the ROM is usually found on "trusted" sources, you can expose yourself to the danger of malware and various viruses (one of the safer ones is Archive.com). Emulated games can also have various problems, as they are usually not titles designed for such gameplay by their original developers. For example, they tend to run slower despite the undisputed performance of your device, because it is still just a reproduction of behavior.
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One of the popular emulators is e.g. Delta. It is designed to emulate retro gaming systems such as Nintendo 64, NES, SNES, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, DS and others. It also offers support for PS4, PS5, Xbox One S and Xbox Series X controllers. Among its many practical features are automatic saving during gameplay or even the ability to enter cheats using the Game Genie and Game Shark programs. You can read about the development of the emulator in one of our older articles.
However, if you don't want to take risks, the App Store offers many titles that are worth checking out without risking anything unnecessarily. Sometimes you have to pay a few crowns for them, but it's definitely better than throwing away the entire device because of a failed unlock.
It is interesting that Apple does not mind that I have a different distribution channel for emails than their official one, for example GMail. These unnecessary restrictions of theirs annoy me, and although I own several Apple devices, the iPhone will never be one of them.
Hopefully, after the EU decree that the other parties must also allow, at least ScummVM will be given. It goes through xcode, but the free compilation only has a license for a week.