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GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

github.com

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Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#51

Post by MereInterest »

peterkelly wrote: post #43
Dylan16807 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I program as a hobbyist. I would like to be able to fiddle around with my ipod touch. For me, $100 per year to test if I would like programming in that environment is too much.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#52

Post by btgeekboy »

MereInterest wrote: post #51
peterkelly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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.

I program as a hobbyist. I would like to be able to fiddle around with my ipod touch. For me, $100 per year to test if I would like programming in that environment is too much.

It's completely free to fire up Xcode and play in the simulator all day long. All the developer account gets you is a signed certificate and access to the App Store. You're free (physically and monetarily) to experiment to your heart's content within the simulator.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#54

Post by deelowe »

GuiA wrote: post #50
MBCook wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SN…

I guess you haven't heard about what happened to bitgamer have you? So far, a suitable replacement hasn't surfaced and it's going to take many years to build up a library again, if it happens at all. Don't kid yourself, they are winning. It's getting harder and harder to find good clean hosts for roms.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#55

Post by Dylan16807 »

btgeekboy wrote: post #52
MereInterest wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I program as a hobbyist. I would like to be able to fiddle around with my ipod touch. For me, $100 per year to test if I would like programming in that environment is too much.

It's completely free to fire up Xcode and play in the simulator all day long. All the developer account gets you is a signed certificate and access to the App Store. You're free (physically and monetarily) to experiment to your heart's content within the simulator.

For access to the app store, the fee is fine. For the ability to put the code onto your actual phone instead of a simulated phone it's a complete ripoff. It shouldn't be bundled like that.

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#56

Post by stevenleeg »

pdknsk wrote: post #53

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.

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

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#57

Post by [deleted] »

TheMakeA wrote: post #41
0x0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#58

Post by megablast »

mikestew wrote: post #11
sksksk wrote: post #2

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?

"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 eve…

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

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#59

Post by pearjuice »

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.

If I am not mistaken, this one does[0].

[0] https://github.com/rileytestut/GBA4iOS/blob/master/gba_bios....

Re: GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

#60

Post by pearjuice »

ancarda wrote: post #44
DrewRWx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm
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