GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required | Hacker News Reader

GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required

github.com

75 pointswpeng56 comments

I'd never seen MacBuildServer.com until just now but they completely violate the terms of service with Apple. They are using their enterprise development certificate to bypass the AppStore. They won't be around long.

I wonder how they deal with the possibility that a github xcode project build file can run arbitrary code... What if someone submits a project to build that spawns a reverse shell and then trojanizes the build server for later builds? I wouldn't trust any ipa coming out of that machine.

There are a number of options. For instance, each build could run on a freshly provisioned virtual machine (like Travis CI), or using a carefully crafted sandbox-exec setup.

I had this create duplicate icons on my homescreen, which sucks since even after uninstalling the App and certificate, the additional one is still there. :(

Had the same problem. Restarting your phone should work. (Or if you're phone is jailbroken, you could just touch 'Respring' in SBSettings.)

Its always amazed me that Nintendo hasn't cashed in yet on creating an official emulator for iPhone/Andriod and releasing thier huge collection of old games in an official marketplace for people to download.... there is no doubt how popular that would be. Everyone would be playing pokemon again.

It would mean more or less an exit to Nintendo's hardware business.

Plus, they're sitting on piles of money, so they're not exactly in a hurry.

There would probably be legal issues with people who had already bought the games in their original cartridge form who don't feel they should have to pay for the game again. It would also stop at Gameboy Advance games, because it becomes increasingly hard to fit two screens worth of content onto an iPhone screen with the necessary buttons and directional pad.

The first one isn't a problem for ninty: you aren't perpetually entitled to new releases because you bought one copy on one medium. You don't get a DVD because you blight Snow White on VHS, and you really don't have standing to torrent it either.

Most people are of the opinion that they have a right to make a copy for backup purposes - a copy that they could then transfer to an emulator, although I have no citations at the ready to verify the legality of this. If Nintendo were to release many games at once, bundled with the app, I'd agree with you, but if they were to let you download them individually through an in-app purchase, I'd tend towards the latter.

Ignoring the obvious legal issues of 3rd party games, Nintendo seems to strongly believe that it's back catalog is worth quite a bit of money and seems to steadfastly against doing anything that may devalue it. They seem to prefer to sell 5k copies of an old game at $5-10 each than 200k copies at $2 on a platform they don't control.

It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.

>It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues.

Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms.

This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms.

So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)

I guess you haven't heard about what happened to bitgamer have you? So far, a suitable replacement hasn't surfaced and it's going to take many years to build up a library again, if it happens at all. Don't kid yourself, they are winning. It's getting harder and harder to find good clean hosts for roms.

I also have trouble understanding this, perhaps they fear market cannibalism? For example old Pokemon taking money from new Pokemon?

Most likely they're afraid of old Pokemon keeping people from buying new Pokemon on a new 3DS, a new 3DS that would have led to other 3DS game sales.

Pretty cool idea, the no jailbreak thing, while true, is a bit disingenuous though, since you need your own developer account.

What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app? Surely it's against their TOS?

Are you sure you need a dev account? I haven't tried it (yet), but the page claims: "No jailbreak OR developer account required :)"

They're using MacBuildServer, which provisions it with its own enterprise account, which is against ToS and I would expect macbuildserver's public provisioning to get shut down and the profile revoked

Yeah, this is blatant abuse of the enterprise certificate program. This kind of activity sucks for those of us that use the enterprise signing cert for legitimate purposes.

This is definitely an abuse of the program, but it hurts to see you use the word 'legitimate' to mean 'apple-sanctioned'. They're not tricking anyone, just letting people install custom apps without paying apple a huge* developer fee.

*$100 is more or less acceptable, $100 per year for revocable permission to compile is awful

To be granted an enterprise or standard developer signing certificate, you must agree to a contract that stipulates the valid uses of that certificate.

I think it's reasonable to call blatant disregard for contractual obligations "illegitimate".

Check what "legitimate" means.

First definition is obeying laws/rules, that fits.

Second definition is "Being in accordance with established or accepted patterns and standards", and that's where it hurts me to read the characterization. They are doing something acceptable and that is very standard in the realm of computing, and seeing it discouraged sucks.

"They're not tricking anyone"

Don't forget Apple. They told Apple that they would not use this key in certain ways, even though they do.

I don't see the problem with calling this "illegitimate". Jailbreaking so you can sideload apps is legitimate. Somehow cracking Apple's verification so you can sign apps without their involvement would be legitimate. But signing up for an enterprise account and then using the keys they give you as part of that in ways they tell you not to is, I think, legitimately illegitimate (ahem).

Okay, I guess I should have expected that to be taken literally. Sorry. I meant that they are tricking, to 1% margin of error, nobody. The core of their business is legitimate. They're not scammers.

Or we can put a different spin on it, and say that they are "only" tricking their major contractual business partner, the one entity without which they would have no business to begin with.

The most important business question would be how they make their money. As far as I know their main service does not depend on violating the license in any way, so they are nowhere near being fraudsters. If they were leaching all their money off of Apple I would accept the judgement, but I don't think that's the case.

Edit: @downvote, am I wrong? I was trying to trust this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047309

> $100 per year for revocable permission to compile is awful

If you're making any kind of serious money on the app store, this cost is practically nothing. Maybe 2-4 hours of your time, tops.

Think about how much the Macbook Pro you use to develop on costs.

I program as a hobbyist. I would like to be able to fiddle around with my ipod touch. For me, $100 per year to test if I would like programming in that environment is too much.

It's completely free to fire up Xcode and play in the simulator all day long. All the developer account gets you is a signed certificate and access to the App Store. You're free (physically and monetarily) to experiment to your heart's content within the simulator.

For access to the app store, the fee is fine. For the ability to put the code onto your actual phone instead of a simulated phone it's a complete ripoff. It shouldn't be bundled like that.

MacBuildServer created at least one of the certs they use for signing inhouse/universal distribution apps on 2013-05-15T16:48:45Z, and it has not yet been revoked. If it does get revoked, they can just remove that part of their service, and continue to allow people to upload their certs, keys and provisioning profiles for building server side. (o.O)

Once MBS becomes more popular, Apple will have to react to prevent others from abusing this. This is the first real test I can recall of their enforcement policy. Honestly, I can't see any enterprises that rely on iOS internally risking TOS violations in a similar public manner even if Apple decides not to enforce TOS with MBS.

Yep, it's just this one feature, the rest of the build service is safe, and potentially cool from a features standpoint. I assume the fear is it would be fairly trivial to add an app store on top of this.

Right, that is the fear, and I think Apple may only act if the competing App Store is affecting their bottom line via lost revenue. But who would build something like this knowing Apple can shutdown their business at any time?

Cydia is the only real competing appstore I am aware of, and they are relying on iOS bugs that Apple keeps patching.

Are there any other examples of apps that would normally be forbidden in the App Store that can be installed in this way?

Yeah, Apple also bans tethering/proxy apps as well as anything related to P2P.

I would imagine you could install Gnu GO, VLC, or any other GPL software that has been removed from the App Store.

"What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app?"

I'm going to guess the chances are near zero. Picture the lurking possibility that Apple revokes your developer key, essentially shutting down your business, because you merely built something on your own hardware that they didn't like. You didn't distribute it, the code never left your network, you just built it. I feel that every argument for "developers will never leave iOS even if Apple does..." goes out the window at that point.

MacBuildServer is distributing the .ipa files they have inhouse signed to anyone that wants it. Apple would only revoke the certs used to sign apps that are distributed outside that assigned enterprise.

Okay, that I could see happening, and I wouldn't have much of a problem with it (abusing the enterprise keys and all). Perhaps I misread, as I took it to be asking about the general case of any dev who downloads source and clicks "Product/Run".

Apple revokes dev keys all the time for a lot less.

There seems to be a SNES version as well by the same author. Really amazing the community around this.

https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS

Without external controller support (and hardware) these projects are all just proof of concept. That is, in this case you're still better of with an Android device and a controller via OTG/BT.

iOS 7 is getting official external game controller APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameCo...

So there's a future for that.

You could also use an iCade or some other controller that uses the iCade protocol.

This is really cool. I found that the game music was a little laggy/skippy while playing Pokemon Sapphire, but that's really no issue for me.

Same while trying out FF6. Also the graphics would sometimes be slow to redraw (ex: during cutscenes).

Overall I love what this team has done, playing these old games on my phono feels downright like magic. It's a shame that Nintendo won't bring these games officially to mobile platforms.

Isn't it illegal to spread any Gameboy BIOS image?

The GBA doesn't have a BIOS; you're thinking of ROMs (effectively, the cartridge contents dumped to a file). ROMs are covered by copyright, and are indeed illegal to distribute without authorized consent (which Nintendo would never give). However, there are homebrew ROMs you can legally download and distribute. No emulator I know of, including this one, illegally ships with (or describes how to illegally obtain) copyright-protected ROMs.

The GBA does in fact have a bios, but modern emulators do not require it except for some rare edge cases that their reverse engineered bios can't handle.

Can you provide any info on this? I'd like to know more, it sounds interesting.

http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm

If I am not mistaken, this one does[0].

[0] https://github.com/rileytestut/GBA4iOS/blob/master/gba_bios....

Why would anyone want to play those games with such poor controls? The person who made this does obviously not like games, but coding, which is fair enough.

Lighten up, man. You don't need to shit on everything just for the sake of shitting on it.

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