
GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required - wpeng
https://github.com/rileytestut/GBA4iOS
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millerm
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.

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0x0
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.

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TheMakeA
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.

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mikeweiss
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.

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MBCook
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 republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was
sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I
bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to
try to publish them again.

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GuiA
>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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deelowe
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.

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sksksk
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?

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mikestew
"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 every argument for "developers will never leave iOS
even if Apple does..." goes out the window at that point.

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mikehotel
MacBuildServer is distributing the .ipa files they have inhouse signed to
anyone that wants it. Apple would only revoke the certs used to sign apps that
are distributed outside that assigned enterprise.

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mikestew
Okay, _that_ I could see happening, and I wouldn't have much of a problem with
it (abusing the enterprise keys and all). Perhaps I misread, as I took it to
be asking about the general case of any dev who downloads source and clicks
"Product/Run".

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evanmoran
There seems to be a SNES version as well by the same author. Really amazing
the community around this.

[https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS](https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS)

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marban
Without external controller support (and hardware) these projects are all just
proof of concept. That is, in this case you're still better of with an Android
device and a controller via OTG/BT.

~~~
footpath
iOS 7 is getting official external game controller APIs:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameCo...](https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameControllerPG)

So there's a future for that.

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DerekL
You could also use an iCade or some other controller that uses the iCade
protocol.

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djent
This is really cool. I found that the game music was a little laggy/skippy
while playing Pokemon Sapphire, but that's really no issue for me.

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lobotryas
Same while trying out FF6. Also the graphics would sometimes be slow to redraw
(ex: during cutscenes).

Overall I love what this team has done, playing these old games on my phono
feels downright like magic. It's a shame that Nintendo won't bring these games
officially to mobile platforms.

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pearjuice
Isn't it illegal to spread any Gameboy BIOS image?

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lcampbell
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) copyright-protected ROMs.

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DrewRWx
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.

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

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pearjuice
[http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm](http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm)

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pdknsk
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.

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

