Apple Approves iDOS Emulator
theverge.com
theverge.com
On my M4 iPad Pro I get around 266 mhz p2 performance. With openGL (not yet in the App Store version) you can get ~77fps in quake 1 in glide mode at 640x480.
Pretty much everything of the dos era is playable in dosbox on a m4.
I tried using UTM on my iPad to emulate Ubuntu and Kali Linux and it was so slow and broken I gave up
If I build the project from scratch in XCode and put it on my iPad from there will JIT work?
You have to jailbreak for JIT though, which makes things fairly annoying for the actual version of UTM. At least the macOS app is actually quite good lol
It is more than fast enough to emulate everything perfectly.
My only (and very minor) complaint is that it relies on the ancient DOSBox-0.74-3, rather than one of the forks with broader support and better emulation of exotic hardware, like DOSBox-X.
With regard to UTM SE, I’ve had mixed results as well. For best results, I recommend installing Windows 95, which was very performant. (Otherwise, keep in mind that the SE stands for ‘Slow Edition’ — really.)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/22/24200536/windows-xp-ipad-...
UTM’s site also has a handful of pre-built images of various operating systems to make it easy to setup a VM to mess around with https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/
Will anyone litigate you for a DOS emulator at this point? Likely not.
Yea, I get it....emulating is essentially mimicking but if you mimic whole bunch of specific features, APIs or whatever, it is still tricky legally. Because if you mimic the whole thing, then you somewhat copied the complete architectural design of hardware/software system that you are emulating.
For example I hear often about Nintendo emulators but if emulator devs decide to sell emulators, couldn't Nintendo sue emulator devs because Nintendo emulators are creating parallel market for Nintendo devices and therefore leaving Nintendo completely out of picture.
> but if you mimic whole bunch of specific features, APIs or whatever, it is still tricky legally.
If you mimic an API, as long as you can prove you didn't copy any of the original code or engineering - you are in the clear.
> because Nintendo emulators are creating parallel market for Nintendo devices
No, they are not. The parallel market only pertains to games (or specifically, the creative work that covers the IP for the game).
If the specific design of a windshield wiper blade was protected by copyright then its patent would be pointless. Therefore patents essentially invalidate copyright where they apply. People often hate software patents, but a 20 year window expires on anything built before 2004.
Most notably, you need to actively apply for them, and they expire much sooner than copyright. Besides that, software is not patentable in all jurisdictions.
Nintendo's counterargument to those cases has to do with DMCA 1201, an extremely broadly drafted law that has to do with copy protection. A lot of console emulators have to implement decryption functions in the emulator because people are bringing in ROM images or ISO dumps that are encrypted. Console emulation has a habit of just grabbing whatever format the piracy scene is using and going from there, which is a bad idea and what enables Nintendo to, say, sue the shit out of Yuzu.
At the same time, however, this isn't a critical flaw that makes all emulation illegal. Yuzu was also extremely sketchy in ways that let Nintendo connect the dots and say "this is infringement". There are plenty of emulators out there written by people who have good copyright hygiene that don't have this problem. e.g. WINE, Ruffle, PCem, DOSBox, etc. And none of this has to do with whether or not the emulator is being sold for money, is licensed as a Free Software project, developed by a community, etc.
In reality, the Appeals Court ruled APIs are copyrightable and the Supreme Court declined to make a ruling on that aspect.