RetroArch iOS and tvOS Emulator for Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega and Sony Games Now Available

[Luna Murasaki]

People who download a 20 to 50-year-old game to their iPad because they are curious about it are not thieves. Companies who hoover up literally every shred of other people's work they can find, stick it in a digital blender, pour it into generative AI, and use that to crush and outcompete its legal owners to make even more money when they are already richer than God are thieves.

I wonder how many people shaming the practice of being bored/curious and downloading some 20th century Pokémon ROMs have ever used Copilot or ChatGPT for anything even once?

Glad to see software like this finally appearing on Apple's Store. It's both legal and ethical for it to be there.

 

[purplerainpurplerain]

And another benefit of the EU's DMA manifests itself!!! Where are all the Apple-lemmings and doom mongers now?

Yes sir my name is Sean Connery you are through to Retro support line. I am calling because you said you having emulating bugs correct? Please sideload the update from notaretroscam.in and it will fix all your problem. For extra feature please insert your credit card number and we will provide ray tracing on all N64 games.

 

[mavis]

If Nintendo, and Sony would just sell the roms, people would buy them. Not everyone, more some would. And it wouldn't cost them anything to do so. They could even create a legit emulator, for their system. Sell it and roms they only work with it, and make a lot of money.

That will never happen. Does anybody else remember how long it took Sony to support playback of MP3s on their Network Walkmans, back in the day? They were all about ATRAC3 and DRM, which is why they lost so much market share to Apple and the iPod. Market share they never gained back.

 

[purplerainpurplerain]

That will never happen.

Sony and Nintendo are offering players retro streaming services. People will want to pirate. Some people get a buzz from downloading stuff for free. Then brag about freedom and human rights stuff. Then the buzz wears off and they start playing the new Call of Duty or Helldivers.

Does anybody else remember how long it took Sony to support playback of MP3s on their Network Walkmans, back in the day? They were all about ATRAC3 and DRM, which is why they lost so much market share to Apple and the iPod. Market share they never gained back.

They got the market share back. The iPod doesn’t exist anymore and the Walkman line still does 😛

It’s amazing how confident people sound when they are badly informed.

 

[UliBaer]

Great news! 🎉 🥳 😁

 

[NagasakiGG]

How bitter can people be that you complain when someone downloads an x years old game and play it on an emulator...

most of the time you can't even buy the games anymore which means the "alternative" would be to give some scalpers 400€ for a copy.

Is that really better...?

 

[mithrandil]

Anyone worked out how to use the iPad (physical) keyboard with this app?

does not work out of the box with apples physical iPad keyboard here too. I tried to enable some settings but I am lost…

tried retroarch on Commodore64 Core and the Amiga Core

technically this should be surely possible as for example when using the vc64web home screen web app, that one is instantly connected to the iPads physical keyboard

vc64web C64 emulator iPad iPhone

C64 emulator iPad iPhone demo browser csdb. Compatible to the progressive-web-app (PWA) standard.

vc64web.github.io

also does anybody figured out how to connect a physical mouse or the keyboards trackpad in retroarch on iPad ?

in vAmigaWeb for example you choose mouse in port1…

vAmigaWeb Amiga emulator iPad iPhone

cycle exact Amiga emulator in html5 / javascript. This Amiga emulator is compatible to the progressive-web-app (PWA) standard.

vamigaweb.github.io

 

[Sophisticatednut]

Do you think this is, at least, at the same level (or even better) than Delta? I cannot download Delta from the App Store here in Europe (and I don’t want to install a third party App Store) so I’m hoping this one can handle the games as well as Delta.

There’s actually many emulators that are much better than Delta that are soon coming to the AppStore such as the Provenance emulator.

And this is perfect example of competitive market. Delta looses you as a customer because they don’t have it in the AppStore so you end up using a competing solution

 

[Zest28]

do you need to see my eb games receipt from 20 odd years ago?

or should i pay a scalper on ebay?

either way nintendo isn’t seeing any money when i download the pokémon red rom

Nintendo offers a subscription service for playing their older games. You should be paying Nintendo if you want to play your Pokemon games.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

How does Nintendo allow this? They are so protective of their content. Is this actually legal?

Well it’s simple really, they just make it possible to run the ROM files that the user provide by themselves.

No it isn’t legal. 98 percent of the ppl using emulators are doing so illegally. Quite sad really.

Well you’re wrong on that, Nintendo needs to prove that the people are actually using pirated content.
The developers themselves aren’t breaking any Copyright or IP by providing the tools.

The emulator itself is legal, and the developers assume (or perhaps wishfully believe) that people are using legitimate games.

I can assure you the developers don’t care about it. As it’s none of their concern if the users use legitimate or illegitimate games

 

[Zest28]

There’s actually many emulators that are much better than Delta that are soon coming to the AppStore such as the Provenance emulator.

And this is perfect example of competitive market. Delta looses you as a customer because they don’t have it in the AppStore so you end up using a competing solution

It's not a "competitive market", it's an illegal market, because people are now able to play Nintendo games illegally.

Nintendo has a subscription service if you want to play their games, but now people will play it without paying for it.

 

[apocalyarts]

Well, it's all perfectly legal. Sure, downloading ROMs and playing them IS NOT, but well, to make a comparison:

Just because I can download a movie and burn it on a DVD Universal Studios cannot eradicate DVD players from the market The only thing they could do is make a better DVD player.

Same goes for Nintendo. They COULD make a BETTER emulator. But they won't.

• Nintendo Switch Online only allows you to play the games Nintendo wants you to play (Pokemon games are not available for obvious reasons)
• N64 emulation quality is bad compared to other achievements from the community (N64 Majora's Mask PC recompile)
• Some systems like the GameCube are not available, because they wan't to charge you big money by offering full price remakes/remasters of certain games (Skyward Sword, Paper Mario 2)

They brought this upon themselves

 

[Sophisticatednut]

It's not a "competitive market", it's an illegal market, because people are now able to play Nintendo games illegally.

Nintendo has a subscription service if you want to play their games, but now people will play it without paying for it.

There no illegal market. People are legally allowed to make digital copies of their legitimately purchased Nintendo games that they OWN and run them in an emulator.

Nintendo having a subscription service is irrelevant to the legality of making copies of things you already own.

The competition is between the developers who have it in the AppStore and 3rd party stores.

 

[dmr727]

Man, what a time to be alive!

 

[firewire9000]

Playing Tekken 3 from the Sony PSX, on an Apple TV using the Xbox Series X controller. Weird mix but feels great.🤣

 

[shadowboi]

No it isn’t legal. 98 percent of the ppl using emulators are doing so illegally. Quite sad really.

Fun fact: when I had PSP as a kid I had it fully flashed. And none of the games I had were legal. I had a large disk with all existing PSP games in ISO format. The only games I played were Lego Star Wars II, The Force Unleashed, Lethal Alliance and… that’s it.

Another fun fact: when I was a kid I was huge Lego Star Wars fanboi and collector. And still have all this stuff which probably cost me more than a fully furnished Macbook Pro does.

Did I underpay to anyone from the gaming industry? Maybe. Did I underpay to copyright holder (Lucasarts at the time, then purchased by Disney as we all know) – I highly DOUBT it.

The thing is, we are surrounded by monopolies. If you want something you pay for that, but you can’t just pay for everything. If there were no pirates and piracy, there would never have been fan communities. And fan communities are by definition the best of the existing promotion spaces, copyright owners don’t need to pay a cent for organic engagement. And without organic engagement it is impossible to sell anything.

There was even a trend in Italy (which was probably started in US) when some cafes offered a free cup of coffee and some pastry to homeless people or people in need. And you guessed it, ordinary people who could pay would rather visit these cafes because of their social impact.

There will always be freeriders and people who simply cannot afford owning 50$+ game during certain stage of their lives.

When I was in high school I have been collecting money to afford iPhone 5 that was back then a state of the art phone. Yet I could not afford original Leather case for it, it was kinda expensive in my opinion back then, so I just put a screen protector and back protector on it and had it like that until upgrading to 6s

 

[shadowboi]

subscription service for the Switch

And that’s really bad. Back when they released these games those were one-time purchase and local. And now they need constant Internet connection and want to milk money every single month. They are doing this on purpose and people should not fall for that and just continue playing emulators.

Nintendo has a lot of resources to re-release these old classics as one single app for Switch and price it at, lets say… 50$. But they don’t want to do it because they wanna milk people with their subscription b$ (that ain’t even cross-platform, I can’t run this on my iPhone for example and have stats synced via Game Center)

 

[Sophisticatednut]

Well, it's all perfectly legal. Sure, downloading ROMs and playing them IS NOT, but well, to make a comparison:

Just because I can download a movie and burn it on a DVD Universal Studios cannot eradicate DVD players from the market The only thing they could do is make a better DVD player.

Same goes for Nintendo. They COULD make a BETTER emulator. But they won't.

• Nintendo Switch Online only allows you to play the games Nintendo wants you to play (Pokemon games are not available for obvious reasons)
• N64 emulation quality is bad compared to other achievements from the community (N64 Majora's Mask PC recompile)
• Some systems like the GameCube are not available, because they wan't to charge you big money by offering full price remakes/remasters of certain games (Skyward Sword, Paper Mario 2)

They brought this upon themselves

Well indeed.

If they:

1. Downloaded a pirated copy of a ROM to play in the emulator; thats illegal.
2. Make a digital copy of a cartridge they don’t own to play in an emulator; thats illegal.
3. Purchased a digital ROM to play in the emulator; completely legal.
4. Make a digital copy of a cartridge they own to play in an emulator; completely legal.

And for the developers if they:

• Include copyrighted material/IP without permission; thats illegal
• Include ROM’s without permission; thats illegal
• Reverse engineer the cpu: completely legal.
• Reverse engineer the code:completely legal.
• Include open source code: completely legal

 

[shadowboi]

How does Nintendo allow this? They are so protective of their content. Is this actually legal?

Nintendo still allows itself to keep selling their underspec Switch until 2025 at least. I think at this point it should be considered illegal, as there are barely any games for Switch.

When they had Gamecube it had 4 or 5 NFS games. Switch has only one of these, and the game is so bad that barely anyone still plays it. There is no Heat, Unbound or even NFS 2015, there is nothing. It is unreal that Hogwarts Legacy actually was released for it (and runs at 30FPS🤦‍♂️)

 

[gegy]

Retroarch is a pain anyway.

Yes it is.
Thousands of setting options. Confusing and complicated. I have not yet managed to start any Rom on the AppleTV. I'd rather wait for RecalBox. At least they have a friendly user interface.

 

[StuBeck]

For some reason I can't download it this morning.

 

[Haiku_Oezu]

Nice! Now all you Apple TV users can experience the frustrating experience of trying to figure out RetroArch’s menus from the comfort of your living room

Seriously it makes perfect sense once you understand what the devs were going for but oof, it’s a process

 

[shadowboi]

Retroarch is a pain anyway.

Facts. They still cannot solve the old bug with Switch Pro Controller and inverted A and B buttons, no matter how much you change buttons when running actual emulator they will switch them again. Almost impossible to play comparing to smth like Dolphin

 

[klasma]

If Nintendo, and Sony would just sell the roms, people would buy them. Not everyone, more some would. And it wouldn't cost them anything to do so. They could even create a legit emulator, for their system. Sell it and roms they only work with it, and make a lot of money.

Nintendo already makes a lot of money by selling a subscription on the Switch that lets you play their old games. They don't want to cannibalize that.

 

[Poot Windbreaker]

I can’t tell you how happy I am that this day has come! I’m already trying to decide what to delete to make more room. The local server created for the tvOS version is pretty clever, though it seems buggy right now. I can’t figure out how to make the magic keyboard for my ipad pro work either, yet. No core update control is a bit of a bummer, but I guess it makes the app easier to use and avoids downloading certain linked libraries on demand (which I think is against app store rules).

I don’t want to get too into the weeds commenting on everyone else’s opinion of RA. I’ll just try to help one person quickly: swapping a and b buttons is simple with any controller. The problem is that people generally see two or more ways to fix this (and yes, it is silly and confusing that there are so many ways to perform the same task), and then toggle multiple, so it can get very confusing which way it is supposed to be. Since you can have a core configuration file (per core) the simplest solution is just to map your switch pro controller with a and b swapped right from the main input device #1 keybinding, but save the configuration profile as a core override. That way, it will only load the swapped a and b keybinds when you’re using that core. You can also set this as an override per game or per system (that means you can have a keybind file that only is loaded for one specific game, or a keybind file that is loaded for any game on a particular system, regardless of which core is used for that one system).