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Think we will see torrent and/or emulator apps for ipad?

B

Bodhi395

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
817
0
Two of my most wanted apps I'd like to see on an ipad are torrent apps and video game emulator apps. They aren't available officially for the iphone in the app store, and I think the reason we don't see them is the fact you can't access the file system of the iphone. Therefore, a torrent app would be useless since you'd have no where to download the files you get from the torrent to. A video game emulator would also not work since you'd have to no way to store your roms for the emulator to access, and the emulator couldn't come with roms because of the legal copyright issues with that.

Yet, the ipad is said to have some sort of system-wide file system that you can access, and even share with your home computer. Given that, I don't see why developers wouldn't make a torrent app and video game emulator apps. I also don't see any reason Apple could refuse the apps in their app store, since torrent apps by themselves are perfectly legal and so are emulators without included roms. Therefore I'm really hoping both these types of applications come to the ipad.

Thoughts?
 
Bodhi395 said:
I also don't see any reason Apple could refuse the apps in their app store, since torrent apps by themselves are perfectly legal and so are emulators without included rooms.
Click to expand...

hahaha

You're kidding yourself. Absolutely no chance. There's already been emulators on the App Store that got pulled pretty quick.
 
I doubt it. Most of the companies that you would want to emulate already have their own stores (Nintendo virtual console) and probbaly aren't interested in that. Apple would want a cut of purchases (less for the publisher), etc...

As for torrents - without background tasks, its useless.
 
I'd say, unless you can jailbreak it then no chance.

Emulators are a grey area for starters because of illegal roms.

As for a torrent app, i'd say its unlikely as without multitasking, the ipad would be stuck downloading and wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Even more unlikely when the version of safari cant even directly download files?

For tasks like that i intend to just use a VNC client to connect to my main system and download/do other jobs


There was a HTML5 speccy emulator i noticed though! http://jsspeccy.zxdemo.org/ But it looks like it will have the same problem as flash as it needs a keyboard for input.
 
cRuNcHiE said:
I'd say, unless you can jailbreak it then no chance.

Emulators are a grey area for starters because of illegal roms.

As for a torrent app, i'd say its unlikely as without multitasking, the ipad would be stuck downloading and wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Even more unlikely when the version of safari cant even directly download files?
Click to expand...


Aren't emulators by themselves (i.e. no copyrighted roms included) perfectly legal?

Also, I agree no multitasking might hinder downloading torrents. But, I would still think even with that handicap, a torrent program for the ipad would be very popular and most people would want one. It would be good if you really wanted to download something and didn't care if you couldn't use your ipad for an hour. Also, I'm betting within the next year Apple includes multitasking on the ipad.
 
Bodhi395 said:
Aren't emulators by themselves (i.e. no copyrighted roms included) perfectly legal?

Also, I agree no multitasking might hinder downloading torrents. But, I would still think even with that handicap, a torrent program for the ipad would be very popular and most people would want one. It would be good if you really wanted to download something and didn't care if you couldn't use your ipad for an hour. Also, I'm betting within the next year Apple includes multitasking on the ipad.
Click to expand...

It depends on the emulator. Most of them require the firmware from the hardware it is emulating in order to work, which have the same legal status as ROMs.

As for torrents... well, there's little legitimate use for that on the iPad. Despite the plenty of legit uses for it, the biggest is still piracy. Other than that it is used to distribute large files; things like Linux distros, game demos, etc. None of those are really of any use for the iPad - it can't run any of that software.
 
Bodhi395 said:
Two of my most wanted apps I'd like to see on an ipad are torrent apps and video game emulator apps. They aren't available officially for the iphone in the app store, and I think the reason we don't see them is the fact you can't access the file system of the iphone. Therefore, a torrent app would be useless since you'd have no where to download the files you get from the torrent to. A video game emulator would also not work since you'd have to no way to store your roms for the emulator to access, and the emulator couldn't come with roms because of the legal copyright issues with that.

Yet, the ipad is said to have some sort of system-wide file system that you can access, and even share with your home computer. Given that, I don't see why developers wouldn't make a torrent app and video game emulator apps. I also don't see any reason Apple could refuse the apps in their app store, since torrent apps by themselves are perfectly legal and so are emulators without included roms. Therefore I'm really hoping both these types of applications come to the ipad.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

If you Jailbreak your iDevice, you can then install Torrentula from Cydia. This is an iPhone app, but it still works on the iPad as well.

When it comes to downloading video files on the iPad through torrents, there are a few hurdles to over come.

First. The file format more than likely is an avi file. Which doesn't play on the iPad. You need to get another player. YXPlayer works great, and you can view alot of formats.

Second. When you download the torrent file, it goes in the same Directory as the Torrent app. You don't have a say in where that file downloads too.

Third. YXplayer only allows the user to view content within the App Directory. This obvsly leads up to the BIG hurdle.

You have the downloaded video (we're not talking about anything else such as Apps, pictures, or Audio, etc... just Video files). The files are in the Torrent Directory on your iPad. The YXplayer only lets you play files within it's own directory,...

You need to MOVE the file from the Torrent Directory to the YXPlayer directory, which isn't easy to do, since I've asked a hundred times on here and I've been told it's impossible and pointless to do.

Sure, you can move files around throughout the directories by SSH'ing your iDevice to the computer which then gives you all the access your looking for.

Tonight, I finally figured it out.

You need to download iFile 1.3 (it's $4.99 in Cydia) but if you find the right REPO you can get it for free.

iFile (not iFiles) lets you access all of the iPads directory structure. Allowing you to access the Torrent Directory, copy/cut the file from that folder and pasting it into the YXPlayer folder. Then you close out of iFile, and re-open YXplayer and then hit the 'local' option down at the bottom to view all the video content in the Local directory where YXPlayer is. Voila, the file is now there and ready to play.

Questions?! Comments?! :)

Hope this helps.

It MAY sound all confussing and such at first, but in all honesty, it move one file from one DIR to another DIR is very simply and easy. Literally takes.. less than 10 seconds (providing you know where your files are located and where you want to move them.)
 
Piracy is a growing problem. Torrents provide the tools. Just remember folks, the copyright police are beginning to prosecute those who download their protected content. I see more and more subpoenas every week ordering customer information related to IPs associated with illegal downloads.

I know there are legal uses for torrents, but let's be honest, most of the torrent traffic is related to downloading copyright protected content. I have no sympathy for those who steal someone else's product.

I'll get off my soapbox now. :)
 
I doubt the iPad has the horsepower to support Bittorrent. With its potentially hundreds of simultaneous connections, it would bring the iPad to a crawl. Plus the limited storage space makes it impractical, and it would destroy the battery life.

Emulators would be very nice, NES and SNES and such, but Apple doesn't take too kindly to them.
 
There is a C64 emulator for the iPhone, which works perfectly well on the iPad.

You get a few games included with it, and there is a store to purchase more game ROMs (all legal...the company has purchased the rights to use them).
 
to my knowledge torrents are legal in canada but resale is illegal. i wish these damn apps werent so expensive. so is the warranty voided when jailbreading iOS4 on ipad?
 
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