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Emulation (Games) Apple Games

Apple Opens the App Store To Retro Game Emulators (theverge.com) 34

Posted by BeauHD from the no-longer-banned dept.
In an update on Friday, Apple announced that game emulators can come to the App Store globally and offer downloadable games. "Apple says those games must comply with 'all applicable laws,' though -- an indication it will ban apps that provide pirated titles," adds The Verge. From the report: The move should allow the retro console emulators already on Android -- at least those that are left -- to bring their apps to the iPhone. Game emulators have long been banned from iOS, leaving iPhone owners in search of workarounds via jailbreaking or other workarounds. They're also one of the key reasons, so far, that iPhone owners in the European Union might check out third-party app stores now that they're allowed in the region. Apple's change today could head that off.

Alongside the new rules on emulators, Apple also updated its rules around super apps, such as WeChat. It now says that mini-games and mini-apps within these apps must use HTML5, clarifying that they can't be native apps and games.
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Apple Opens the App Store To Retro Game Emulators More

Apple Opens the App Store To Retro Game Emulators

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  • will they be allowed to load roms from storage? from any url?

    • The devil is most definitely in the details with this announcement, since piracy pretty much is the killer app for emulating old game consoles. The irony being that most of the stuff I'd want to play, I already am legally entitled to through my Switch. It'd just be a lot more convenient to play on my iPhone instead, because the Switch is a chonky boi and I prefer just leaving in its dock at home.

    • Re:will they be allowed to load roms from storage? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @08:24PM (#64373784)

      Yes they’re making a usb c adapter that accepts Atari 2600 cartridges.

      • Yes they’re making a usb c adapter that accepts Atari 2600 cartridges.

        The adapter will be only $199 and have a M1 processor, for reasons.

      • This exists (if you use a USB-A to USB-C adapter), but given the recentness of this announcement, I doubt they've bothered to make iOS drivers for it yet.

  • will dos box be allowed? or will they say not retr (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @07:39PM (#64373738)

    will dos box be allowed? or will they say not retro? say not an console?

  • Thank you, EU (Score:2, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 )

    The "Alternative Marketplaces" that are already in Apple's approval queue to launch imminently in the EU are filled with emulators.

    The problem here is that the open app ecosystem available to the EU creates a massive disparity between the capabilities of the platform there vs everywhere else in the world. The headlines about emulators coming to EU iPhones have been going for a few weeks now. If you can run emulators in Europe but not in the US, users simply are not going to stand for it.

    I was going to say t

  • apple cultists (Score:5, Funny)

    by ACForever ( 6277156 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @09:32PM (#64373854)
    get in here with your "rom disguied as viruses " rants
  • HTML5 means you need their WebKit engine, which is ridiculous--Apple itself isn't bound to such nonsense. I'm curious if they're using it as a catchall to include react/JSI, which is a bit better, because react components easily support "super" (read: basic) app functionality. They passed an app I worked on in 2018 that used a JSX parser to load components outside of CodePush updates, so depending on what you need to do, they'll likely work with devs beyond just HTML5. It's still ridiculous, and discourages

    • Why would Apple not use web kit?
      What else would they use?

      • Apple can use WebKit all they want. We shouldn't have to. We're talking about allowing app developers to enable dynamic functionality which ObjC and Swift can easily support without a bloated, buggy, and outdated browser engine dictating terms. While DOM is useful, to a point, it shouldn't be a requirement, nor constrained to a single engine. There are many reasons we might want to avoid firing up a browser to run code or at least use a custom engine. Apple has claimed this is a security constraint, but the
        • Thank you for explaining what should not have to be explained on a tech site.
          • Some of this definitely should be obvious, but with the psyop bs and artificial constraints in play, there's a lot of nuance that might not be clear unless you're in the trenches.
  • Soon there will be free YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter frontends which remove the need to pay fees for a better experience as Apple begins to screw over the larger freemium silo app providers, now that the IAP tax incentive to protect them has been removed. The EU will even encourage this behaviour until it is too late to find a fair legal basis to revert it.

    You can pretty much guarantee that the next level of malicious compliance will be that Apple will turn a blind eye on protecting the business in

  • They should allow the Newton emulator, called Einstein.

  • We really need more legal roms (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @03:13AM (#64374112)
    With old consoles dying of old age and surviving cartridges going for huge amounts on the second hand market, we really need a good rom licensing solution that allows you to buy roms and allow you to use any emulator you wish. The alternative is waiting until the 22nd century when roms go public domain Steamboat Willie style which of course most of us on Slashdot won't be alive to see. It's a shame that some game console roms are nearly 50 years old now and yet are "young" where copyright is concerned. Hopefully Apple getting into the emulator market will start making the rom market more legitimate. I know in the Amiga community roms can be purchased for a reasonable price, maybe other systems will get involved now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Being able to sell you the game, and then sell it to you again on the next generation console, and again on your phone, with no lending or rentals... It's too good for them to ever consider selling you the ROM.

      • I'm not sure selling the same game on later gen consoles is a real thing.

        When games are re-released in later generations they are typically either remasters or remakes. Which would entail a new ROM.

        I.e. selling you a given ROM doesn't stop them from making money on the future versions of the same game.

  • Note: This opinion is based from what I read elsewhere. Before this change, an app had to embedded every ROM it could use, e.g. Atari collections that had many games - it is either all or nothing here. After this change, an app can download a ROM as extra data provided to the app by the app developer, that is, you download ROMs from the developer. Lets imagine a Metal Gear collection (to name something recent) where you can download games that take GBs of data each. Now you can have a launcher and download

  • Interesting. I thought I thought a change along these lines had already happened. ScummVM has been on the AppStore for a couple of months now. You can hook it up to cloud services (Dropbox etc) or copy files from iCloud/etc to ScummVM storage on the ipad. It works really well.

  • Will Apple allow Bittorrent clients that only download legal content?

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