does anyone reckon that apple would accept an emulator with built in app commerce to buy roms say like £0.59 or $0.99 each but the roms approved for resale by the developers would that take out the illegality and make it possible for appstore release if the game was free and you pay for roms please give me your views
If your not getting the consent of the original manufacturer (sega nintendo ext.) than its still illegal to sell these. Sega not selling their own systems anymore and just games has just ported sonic just using a weak emulator. This is what you'll see. You'll never see a place to buy roms by just some person. Never. It wont work. You will see big names like sony(psp) and Nintendo getting in on their own version of the app store, but why sell Nintendo games on an iphone when they can get you to buy a dsi? Its not illegal to have roms of the games if they are backups. jailbreak your phone simple as that..
mine is jalbroken i love the emulators and playing music at the same time its great but with a ds you need and mp3 player or other audio device to do the same but what if the rom developers get a split of the money would they agree
its a great idea and id love to see an emulator for some gameboy games, but with apple, i cant see it happening
In order for Apple to even consider it, a developer would: A) Have to have the full consent and any applicable licenses from the manufacturer of the computer/console being emulated, including any BIOS and operating systems used by the system. Barring that, the developer would have to write their own compatible BIOS (and OS if applicable) from scratch so as to avoid copyright infringement. B) Have to have the full consent and applicable licenses from each of the developers of the software they wish to make available for sale via DLC -- or the developers/IP holders themselves would likely publish ROMs themselves and give the emulator developer a small cut. If both of these conditions are met then Apple would have no legal reason to reject such it. However, it is exceptionally unlikely that this would ever happen, and even if it were, I wouldn't expect it to be cheap, as there would be licensing fees and royalties involved. Beyond that, your only recourse for emulators is the jailbreak scene.
Jailbreaking seems to be the only viable way to get emulators onto the iPhone. When I first purchased mine, I had the mindset of doing it so I could play things like Zelda/FF on my phone but I have actually found plenty of solid games to keep me occupied without doing so. 100th post, haha!
Can I point out that this is not hypothetical. There are already emulators in the App Store. These are the ones I use: Frotz is a Z-machine emulator. i41CX+ emulates the old HP41CX. Chip-8 Emulator is exactly what it sounds like. Sonic the Hedgehog is technically an emulator.
No, of course it's illegal. Unless you have permission from all the companies that created the games, which would be tons of companies want there share... You won't make much because the company wants profit. So does apple, and besides. You could get one free just by jailbreaking. You would probably make about...4 cents? a week or something.
Frotz is an interactive story interpreter, not an emulator, and it is not bound by copyright, nor are the scripts it comes with (they were released to the public domain). Calculator emulators do not violate copyrights unless they used the original ROMs, and the ones in the App Store don't. Software for said emulators is PD. Chip-8 is technically a platform, not a single computer, and it has always been public domain and freely available to anyone who wanted to design a computer around it -- that was the point of Chip-8 from its inception. All of the software developed for it is PD. Sonic uses an emulator that was officially adopted by Sega themselves. Obviously they're allowed to do with it as they please as it's their IP, but they made it single-purpose to play Sonic only.
Interpreter, emulator, splitting hairs. And it's too late to tag on conditions. None of those points were specified by the OP. He didn't ask if it would be legal to publish an illegal emulator as it appears many have assumed.
True -- there's a lot of misconception as to whether emulators in and of themselves are legal, and the answer is that so long as they don't contain copyrighted information (built-in unaltered BIOS/OSes), they are perfectly legal. It's the software you run on them that may not be, and Apple won't let anything on the App Store if even the potential for piracy exists, regardless of whether there are homebrews available and a custom BIOS.
if you do like quests then SCUMMVM is your choice - http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/IPhone works only with the jailbreak
I guess a good comparison would be what Cloanto did with Amiga Forever, and more recently C64 Forever. It a fully legal emulator as they've licenced the machine ROM images. http://www.amigaforever.com/ How many people actually buy it rather than just grab WinUAE and hope to find the ROMs off a torrent or p2p share... I can't imagine it'd be that many, but then again the company is still up and running so it can't be too bad.
Nice suggestion. I just bought it. Funny thing is that a lot of the roms are cracked. They even have inserted 'cracked by _____' messages at launch. Weird. Maybe that is just a means of bypassing tedious copy protection measures of the time. 'Ports of Call' is one of the games included, so I am going to ask Rolf if Cloanto has been authorized to redistribute his game. EDIT: Yes, they acquired permission to distribute, at least in the case of Ports of Call. It is probably all on the level.
The iPhone developer agreement forbids the creation of any VMs (virtual machines) to the App Store. While the definition can probably be argued, I would interpret this as a strict no to any emulation software. The teams responsible for approving software will probably evaluate this on a case-by-case basis though.
I'm thinking that they don't mind so much if the VM/emulator is a fully self-contained system, either by way of having no means to insert potentially infringing software on it (Chip-8, Sonic), or by having access to an offloaded server that contains legit, developer-approved content only (Frotz). Mind you once again, Frotz isn't really a VM, just a script interpreter and text parser, so it doesn't really count.
