Emulate the Past: Retro Games on Your iPhone
For years, Android gamers have been bragging about their phones having a secret weapon: emulators! This meant you could play all those classic Nintendo, Sony, and Sega titles right on your phone. For iPhone users? No such luck. You were stuck with either jailbreaking your phone (which can be risky) or using clunky web-based emulators that weren't nearly as good.
Well, guess what? This just might be the biggest surprise of 2024 for Apple fans. It seems things are changing in the world of iOS. On Friday, Apple updated its App Store rules, and get this - they're now allowing game emulators!
In addition to the main software, some apps offer other features. These can include mini games and apps that run within the main app, games that are streamed live from the internet, chatbots that can answer your questions, and add-ons that give the app more features. For example, apps that let you play old video games may also allow you to download the games themselves.
Apple just made a surprising move! In a major shift, they're loosening their grip on the iPhone operating system. This comes after pressure from governments around the world, particularly the US and Europe, who argued that Apple should allow more competition on iPhones.
Remember how Apple used to block cloud gaming services? Well, that's over. Now you can play games through services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now on your iPhone. This is just the beginning, though. Apple's new guidelines also hint at allowing mini-apps built with HTML5. This paves the way for "super apps" like WeChat, which combine features like messaging and payments into a single app, something not currently allowed on iPhones.
While you can't download these emulator apps just yet, expect developers to jump on this opportunity and bring them to iPhones soon. It's a whole new world for iPhone users, and it seems like more choices are on the horizon.
Are emulators illegal?
Emulators get a bum rap sometimes. People think they're all about playing games illegally, but that's not quite true. Building an emulator, a program that lets you play games from another system, is perfectly legal. The problem is what kind of games you use it for and how the emulator itself helps you get those games.
Emulators run games from files called ROMs, which are basically digital copies of the game cartridges. You can legally get ROMs by buying the original game, but a lot of ROMs float around the internet for free, which is illegal. That's where things get tricky. If an emulator not only plays these pirated ROMs but also shows you how to find them online, that's when the creators get in hot water.
Take Nintendo, for example. They recently shut down an emulator for the Nintendo Switch called Yuzu. Why? Because Yuzu wasn't just letting people play games, it was basically teaching them how to steal them. Nintendo is famous for being aggressive about protecting its copyrights, even going after people who post their music on YouTube. So it's no surprise they'd come after emulator creators who help people pirate games.
This means that if popular emulators like Retroarch and Dolphin ever want to be available on iPhones and iPads (iOS), they'll probably have to avoid any mention of how to find ROMs online. The responsibility will be on you, the user, to track down ROMs legally. There are some legitimate sources, like the archive.org collection, which gets a special pass because they're all about preserving old video games for the future.
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