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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

I can go find NES games and Gameboy games in my parents basement. If the NES worked I could play it or find a knock off on Amazon. Pretty sure I have a Doom floppy.

Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them.

Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

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> Kids these days will be lucky to remember their favorite mobile games. Let alone be able to play them.

I'm already feeling the pain of this. There was a game for iOS called GeoDefense (and a sister game, GeoDefense Swarm). To this day these were my favorite games on the phone. But iOS 10 ended support for one of them, then a later OS update bricked the other one.

The developer hasn't updated these games to work in new iOS, so they're lost to time.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and warn past-Me to reserve a 4S for just playing these games.

Sorry for self-reply , but hopefully someone out there can point me to some similar tower-defense games? Everything I see on the app store now is bloated with graphics or IAP and shitty gameplay. If you're familiar with the GeoDefense games[0], you know what I'm talking about.

[0] http://www.criticalthoughtgames.com/geodefense.html

Mindustry and Infinitode are both lots of fun

+1 for Mindustry. Factorio with more tower defense emphasis. And FOSS!

It's not exactly tower defence, although i think it's close, but i am currently recovering from a pretty serious Bad North obsession:

https://www.badnorth.com/

You defend procedurally generated islands from viking hordes, but rather than towers, you use up to four squads of soldiers from an army you grow over dozens of islands. The art and sound design are lovely, and the gameplay is engrossing. Each island takes a few minutes to play, and a campaign lasts a few hours.

It's something like 5 dollars on iOS and Android, and has no ads or IAP.

I still miss Aurora Feint from the dawn of iOS.

GeoDefense! Oh hell yes. I played so much of that. I still have a 4 and a 4s somewhere. Might try it out!

I have a huge folder of iOS apps, but.. unfortunately in I think iOS 9 or so, Apple made it so backing up your iPhone stopped backing up the applications, and I believe made it impossible to install applications from your hard drive backups (that may have happened in a later iOS version - I forget). Meaning... iOS apps are now simply unrecoverable once they aren't on App Store anymore. Good thing I have a couple old iPhones which actually allow installing these old backed up applications. Even then, the entire ecosystem is completely reliant on internet authentication to even install the OS, so if your phone needs to be restored -- good luck. Very sad times, indeed.

Yeah the personal effect of this for me is, I can't show people the song I had in Tap Tap Revenge anymore. I do have an old iPhone that still has it installed, but it's not like I carry that around with me. The app is no longer on App Store and I thus could never install it on my newer iPhone, nor restore my backed up copy to it (and even if I could restore it, it wouldn't run anyways because of the breaking of backwards compatibility in recent iOS updates). Overall, a whole ton of user-hostile product choices in the iOS ecosystem, sadly. Not the Apple I grew up with, where I could modify anything to my heart's content (ResEdit, anyone?)...

Some of those NES and Gameboy games might not work as originally intended. Lots of them had internal batteries in order to save information and those batteries are starting to die. Floppies from that era and early CDs are also at the age in which they are likely to degrade. So while some of this old tech might have a longer shelf life than tech today, as the video says, entropy will get us all in the end.

Well you can still download the rom and the machine is fully emulated, forever. Not sure there is a way to play geometry wars in any fashion. Besides batteries can be replaced and even then you'll miss your high scores but you'll still be able to play.

I've still got Geometry Wars on my 32-bit iPad. It's my go-to airplane game—if there's a 120v outlet to plug into.

No multiplayer, though.

Could you reinstall it if it was uninstalled?(real question)

I don't think so. It's part of why I haven't.

Replacing the battery isn’t hard. There are plenty of youtube instructional videos on it.

Most of my floppies are dead, but most NES games did not have batteries, and it's really easy to replace the batteries in the ones that did (it's usually just a CR2032).

This is what I experienced with Tap Tap Revenge on iOS. What used to be one of the highlights of iPhone and iPod touch gaming was eventually bought out by Disney, ported to Android (poorly), and then phased out. Luckily, users had dumped some of the song packs and put then online, and with some reverse engineering and hooking, you could swap the game’s server endpoint with a custom one and play it again. This was my main side project in high school junior/senior year and a highlight in my college application.

Unfortunately, it also became victim to Apple’s discontinuation of 32bit apps.

Forget kids, I'm an adult that's missing some early adulthood games.

Flash, man.

iOS and Android have been dominating for a decade - i bet there will absolutely be ROMs out there.

The flash games I played as a teenager at the turn of the century are about to be completely gone, like tears in the rain.

* https://www.kongregate.com/games/scarybug/chronotron * https://www.acno.tv/acno/

You might be happy to know about Flashpoint, the Flash games conservation project: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

The developer of the game has the responsibility for it. It's very simple: He/she can just release the code and game assets. That will make sure that the game lives on forever. Anyone interested in it will pick it up and port it over to new platforms.

Even if the developer does not do this, it's still possible. Some people will get the game assets and reverse engineer the game. There are countless examples for this. Unfortunately sharing the game assets will be illegal (at least for a while, until the copyright ends), so this will make it harder for the game to survive.

Also, there will be emulators at some later point, where you can play the original game binaries.

I have a humble bundle set of android APKs I think.

The will once emulating an iPhone is something that people can feasibly do. While there's been commercial interest in this area, it's not widely available yet.

Will they ever have an iOS or Android equivalent of ROMs?

Yes. Torrent sites are littered with archives full of apk files already.

It's pretty easy to backup and install Android apps to/from a file.

You see, that’s not in Apple’s business plan. If they can’t extract money from you while pushing down developers, they don’t care to do it. We don’t own our devices like we used to. The terms of service alone are egregious.

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