Why th hype about the app Gridlee?

[hassoon]

Hi, while using flipboard and reading apple related news, I came across a dozen, literally, of articles concerning an app called Gridlee. What I concluded that it was pulled from the App Store before and now it's back with an emulator hidden in the app. I wanna know what advantages could I get from the emulator ? I downloaded it and I'm sure apple will pull it from the App Store as soon as possibl. Could I be able to play other games, say like Pokemon, on my iPhone through it ( like what an emulator does )? Thank you

[wol]

Originally Posted by hassoon

Hi, while using flipboard and reading apple related news, I came across a dozen, literally, of articles concerning an app called Gridlee. What I concluded that it was pulled from the App Store before and now it's back with an emulator hidden in the app. I wanna know what advantages could I get from the emulator ? I downloaded it and I'm sure apple will pull it from the App Store as soon as possibl. Could I be able to play other games, say like Pokemon, on my iPhone through it ( like what an emulator does )? Thank you

Gridlee runs on the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME), thus the focus is on emulating Arcade games, and not on emulating (handheld) video games consoles like, e.g., the Game Boy. Thus you have to wait for Nintendo to release a Pokemon app for iOS (which might take them at least several more years as currently it would hurt their business model of selling Handhelds).

I guess that part of the excitement is pure nostalgia. Folks who used to be kids in the 1970s, '80s, and early '90s can relive their childhood memories of dropping quarters in the arcade machines and playing Pong, Asteroids, Space Invaders, PacMan, Donkey Kong, etc.

On the technical side, Gridlee runs on the 2010 version of MAME (0.139?), while iMAME was based on the 2001 version. The later version can emulate many more Arcades than the older one. One the down side, iMAME code was optimized to run on ARM architecture, while the Gridlee implementation lacks this optimization. Thus some emulations apparently run less smooth than with iMAME.