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throwanem

One question not obviously answered on the site: What's on here to make it worth the trouble?

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The main thing is Delta, an excellent game emulator: https://github.com/rileytestut/Delta

Actually, it's why AltStore was written.

Is console emulation on a smartphone a good user experience? I’d love to hear more from someone who does that.

I’m worried about battery drain, lack of hardware keys (or the need to carry a gamepad) as well as being interrupted by notifications.

I’m likely spoiled by nintendo switch; and there are also dedicated console emulation devices, they seem interesting too.

I recently replayed most of Pokemon Fire Red in RetroArch on my android phone (installed via f-droid). It worked surprisingly well! I only stopped because I bought a dedicated device to do so (Anbernic RG35XX, which is also fantastic). So in a pinch, console emulation on a smartphone, especially for older consoles like Gameboy Advance, works very well.

To get around the on-screen buttons, I ended up connecting my ps5 controller via Bluetooth which worked amazingly straight out of the box with zero configuration.

I can play Wind Waker on my Pixel 4a, a mid level phone from a couple years ago. I imagine if apple could be arsed to open their stupid ban on jits you could emulate switch titles without a hitch on iPhones.

You probably still want a game pad for any 3d titles tho, on Gameboy on screen inputs are fine but the lack of precision can be really annoying to get over. Fortunately the xbox controllers work out of the box with dolphin.

AltStore has an option to (temporarily) enable JITs on a per app basis.

JIT is not disabled on the hardware level, safari does use it for JS for example. Just ordinary AppStore apps can’t do so.

Also, in my experience with Delta playing some of the Pokemon games, I noticed no difference between the non-JIT and JIT-ted versions.

I see, the last time I looked into this was shortly after apple closed the last known jailbreak options and before they allowed jits in some circumstances.

The lack of a speed difference I assume is down to the fact that delta supports some pretty weak consoles which you could emulate in a browser. Dolphin's jit vs interpreter vs cached interpreter in for example Wind Waker is a 10-40x speed improvement on my phone.

a lot of gamepads plug in to the lightning or USB c port like the razer kishi.

iphones especially have good SoCs for emulation, but modern android is really good as well barring high level GPU driver bugs occasionally

Anything portable has always emulated well (or at least have since 2012).

Virtual buttons exist for the gamepads of older devices (NES-derived layouts generally look pretty good, so NES/SNES/GB/GBC/GBA emulates well).

The 3D home consoles tend to be a bit more dependent on the game (early 3D games have some pretty shitty button mappings in general and that's only amplified when emulating with virtual buttons).

As for emulation quality; handhelds emulate really well. Consoles made after 2000 are a bit of a toss-up at times, but generally also work decent.

As for battery drain; not an issue with handheld/old system emulation. Can't speak to home console emulation sorry.

I've used Delta both with a gamepad (Backbone) and just with the touch screen to play a few Gameboy Advance games. I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max. The experience was super nice both ways.

The touch screen interface is essentially the shape of the gameboy or whatever Nintendo console you're emulating and is responsive and works the way you expect it to. The Backbone connects automatically and just works. If you want, you can remap the buttons.

The annoying thing about having to use Delta and Altstore is the need to keep AltServer running on my desktop or laptop. Frequently, my phone would be unable to find the running instance the only way to refresh the app (required every 7 days) would be to connect with a wire to my desktop or laptop. When it worked, it was great. But when it didn't, I was annoyed.

That said, it does have cloud sync with various services and it does work well.

While travelling, being able to have a rather large library of classic games to play, while using the device that I'm already carrying is a huge benefit. While I wish emulation on iOS was a little easier, using Delta/AltStore is not difficult or anything.

I've carried a Backbone with me and played a ton of GBA games with touchscreen controls and the backbone, and it's pretty great, depending on the game. Carrying the backbone is a lot smaller than a Nintendo Switch or one of the many larger screened android emulation devices that are now available.

This is all up to personal preference obviously, but having one less device to carry is a big plus for me. Game emulation is the one thing that makes me question whether or not it's time to ditch iOS and just get an Android for my daily driver...

I never got the appeal. I installed RetroArch on my iPad instead.

How hard could it be to just post a list of what's available via the service? Even the lists being shared are pretty vague in terms of app descriptions. Some look downright sketchy.

I mean, what exactly is the value prop here?

You can sideload any app with this if you can get ahold of the .ipa file.

There is an app called UTM which allows running full VMs which could be useful for an iPad with a keyboard.

how is performance?

If you run an ARM OS in it, the performance is great. If you run an x86 one it’s unusable.

That still needs the Virtualization entitlement on iOS which I thought you couldn’t get if you’re outside Apple, unless you’re jailbroken and can work around the signing requirement. Otherwise UTM runs emulating the OS and is slow as Christmas.

Ah you are probably right, I remembered that being gated behind something but I assumed it was the altstore which was the thing you had to do for full virtualisation.

> If you run an ARM OS in it

Only arm64/aarch64 operating systems I know are GNU/Linux or Mac OS X. I doubt the iPad is strong enough to run a usable Mac OS X virtual machine, and I don't see a ton of value running either a Linux distribution as CLI ("headless") or with a GUI on an iPad as an app in a window?

I use an app called "iSH" which gives you an x86 Alpine Linux distro and a shell you can play around with. It's pretty useful whenever I need to ssh into something, and if you're patient you can actually do some programming on it with vim or whatever text editor you want. Even clang works!

iPads definitely has enough CPU power for ARM macos, limiting factor is the RAM.

Even the base tier ipad is more powerful than a raspberry pi which is more than enough for a gui linux.

The ipad pro contains the same chip as the macbooks and comes with 8gb/16gb ram options. It's more powerful than the average Windows laptop.

How hard could it be to just post a list of what's available via the service?

That wouldn't drive installs of the Altstore app, though!

This list of other emulators looks promising:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AltStore/comments/p4ih1f/my_preferr...

I wonder if there's any chance of getting modern Linux on my M1 iPad at near-native speed.

According to https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/ UTM.HV.ipa with TrollStore should give you Hypervisor (i.e. native virtualization, not JIT or interpreter) and USB support. I haven't had an M1 iPad to try it out but videos suggest that particular combination is speedy, outside GPU acceleration of course.

I have a M1 iPad Pro, running Windows 11 on that Version of UTM. It runs surprisingly well. I was able to use the desktop Version of Photoshop without any Problems (even more demanding filters). I even was able to run rekordbox and connect my DJ Mixer to it so USB also seems to be working great.

Basically any app that is not allowed in the app store because it uses internal APIs, or does things not allowed by Apple.

For example a PornHub viewer. Would never be allowed. Or a torrent manager.

There were literally only a few apps I could see listed amongst AltStore sources I saw.

Where else are you finding all these apps you seem to be alluding to?

Check out https://iosninja.io/ipa-library and https://appdb.to

Based on these the main selling point seems to be pirated apps and content.

That’s certainly one of them. For me it’s more like having browser extensions in your native apps. Ad blocking, feature enhancements, etc. For example: there is no “Instagram Premium” I can even pay for to remove ads. But with this there is.

As well as some apps that are just off limits for the App Store, like emulators.

Thanks. I figured I was missing something!

For me - KODI , I hate that I have to use files app, and VLC to watch my videos from dropbox, and other sources.

And any form of torrent client.

https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus

Spotify and YouTube premium for free, in my case.

So copyright infringement. Really a poor argument against Apples policies.

People should upload an app that allows you to bypass the regional limitations on 5ghz WiFi and see what the EU thinks about banning app stores then. Because according to the typical regulator it’s bad when others impose limits, but not when they impose limits.

copyright infringement doesn't exist in the same form everywhere, I don't think a phone should have a single monopolized app store just to prevent US based copyright infringement.

In other news, the DMCA type rules do not apply to the whole internet and the Berne convention is just a fiction that stands in the way of the glorious EU forcing Apple to open their App Store.

The free transmission of information should usually triumph over the enforcement of intellectual property. It's a symbol of a healthy democracy, in my opinion.

If you want to argue the abolition of copyright that’s fine but it’s revolutionary and not the subject of this thread.

Copyright (and Copyleft) is a societal concept, not a technical one. In the technical world, there is only copying. If someone tries to limit your ability to copy data by using a societal concept as an excuse, they are directly censoring the content you interact with. That's not just democratically harmful, it's a bad omen for the market.

It's so anti-revolutionary that currently-sitting administrations in America and Europe agree that Apple is deserving of anticompetitive inquiry.

A not very interesting philosophical essay that is rehashing arguments everyone has seen a million times and is not about the subject of this thread.

A poor argument? To me, as a final user, it's the greatest one.

>Because according to the typical regulator it’s bad when others impose limits, but not when they impose limits.

I agree, regulators shouldn't exist.

> So copyright infringement. Really a poor argument against Apples policies.

>> A poor argument? To me, as a final user, it's the greatest one.

>> I agree, regulators shouldn't exist.

So you don't want regulators, even though regulators are the only possible way things like the copyright infringement tools you like might be made mainstream. Got it.

So you think that a private company with the sole purpose of increasing profits should have the same say as a more-or-less democratically elected body with the purpose of bettering the lives of its citizens?

That bootlicking for corporations never really did a thing for me personally — they are literally paper clip optimizers without a care for anyone.

So you think no corporation should be able to decide anything, everything should be left to pseudodemocratic EU agencies that are mostly concerned with clinging to power?

Which, by the way has nothing to do with any of the points I was making, and is just the typical hurr durr Apple bad response.

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