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GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

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Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#41

Post by TheMakeA »

0x0 wrote: post #40
millerm wrote: post #19

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.

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.

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.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#42

Post by Dylan16807 »

mikeash wrote: post #39
Dylan16807 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I guess I should have expected that to be taken literally. Sorry. I meant that they are tricking, to 1% margin of error, nobody. The core of their business is legitimate. They're not scammers.

Or we can put a different spin on it, and say that they are "only" tricking their major contractual business partner, the one entity without which they would have no business to begin with.

The most important business question would be how they make their money. As far as I know their main service does not depend on violating the license in any way, so they are nowhere near being fraudsters. If they were leaching all their money off of Apple I would accept the judgement, but I don't think that's the case.

Edit: @downvote, am I wrong? I was trying to trust this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047309

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#43

Post by peterkelly »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #30
jeiting wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is blatant abuse of the enterprise certificate program. This kind of activity sucks for those of us that use the enterprise signing cert for legitimate purposes.

This is definitely an abuse of the program, but it hurts to see you use the word 'legitimate' to mean 'apple-sanctioned'. They're not tricking anyone, just letting people install custom apps without paying apple a huge* developer fee. *$100 is more or less acceptable, $100 per year for revocable permission to compile is awful

> $100 per year for revocable permission to compile is awful

If you're making any kind of serious money on the app store, this cost is practically nothing. Maybe 2-4 hours of your time, tops.

Think about how much the Macbook Pro you use to develop on costs.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#44

Post by ancarda »

DrewRWx wrote: post #29
lcampbell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) copy…

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.

Can you provide any info on this? I'd like to know more, it sounds interesting.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#45

Post by jcl »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #12
idunno246 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are there any other examples of apps that would normally be forbidden in the App Store that can be installed in this way?

I would imagine you could install Gnu GO, VLC, or any other GPL software that has been removed from the App Store.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#46

Post by alanctgardner2 »

djent wrote: post #14
mikeweiss wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#47

Post by benguild »

millerm wrote: post #19

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.

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. :(

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#48

Post by djent »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #46
djent wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Most people are of the opinion that they have a right to make a copy for backup purposes - a copy that they could then transfer to an emulator, although I have no citations at the ready to verify the legality of this. If Nintendo were to release many games at once, bundled with the app, I'd agree with you, but if they were to let you download them individually through an in-app purchase, I'd tend towards the latter.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#49

Post by nathan_f77 »

benguild wrote: post #47
millerm wrote: post #19

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.

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. :(

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

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#50

Post by GuiA »

MBCook wrote: post #24
mikeweiss wrote: post #9

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.

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 repu…

>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 :)

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