It's now possible to play PS1 games on your iPhone thanks to a new app called Gamma.
Developed by ZodTTD (AKA Benjamin Stark) – an individual who has a long history in the world of emulation – Gamma is pretty feature-rich. It supports Bluetooth controllers, runs on both the iPhone and iPad, supports cloud saves for your game files and save states and automatically finds cover artwork for your collection. You don't need to worry about tracking down BIOS files to run games, either.
The Verge has done some digging into the history of the app, and it turns out that Stark's code was used in Riley Testut’s first iOS emulator, GBA4iOS – Testut, as you may recall, is the developer behind Delta, one of the most popular emulators to hit the iOS App Store so far.
Gamma is “based off Delta’s codebase (excluding the actual PSX core),” Testut tells The Verge, before adding that ZodTTD has "full permission to do that." Testut says he owes a debt to Stark, and that he's “the reason I started developing emulators in the first place."
[source theverge.com]
Comments 7
Well I shall give it a whirl on iPad even though I have the PSIO hooked up for when I need a fix of PS1
Nice, already download it, I'll copy my psone games files on pc tonight. I wish delta has psone emulation too so I only need one ios emulation 😃
This is wild to me. PS1 emulation has been up and running on Android for over a decade. Hard to believe it's taken this long for iOS.
@IntrepidWombat It was a combination of things. Steve Jobs' had a long standing beef with Adobe which lead to him implementing a "no interpreted code" rule for all apps on the App Store, as a way of preventing Flash from being on the iPhone. This unfortunately meant most emulators were blocked as well for quite a long time.
Later on, Apple did relax this rule, but they wouldn't allow apps that could play anything, they wanted each release to be a specific game so they could give it an age rating (I think possibly this was done to stop things like the Xbox streaming app). So things like Sega's individual Megadrive game releases would be allowed, but a general Megadrive emulator was not.
That said, if you had a Mac, you could build emulators for your iPhone and iPad quite easily. MAME4iOS uses the most recent PC version of MAME and there's also Provenence which does NES, SNES, N64, Master System, Megadrive, Saturn, PS1, GameBoy, GameGear and loads of others I've never used! But now that Apple have been forced by the EU to allow side-loading of apps, they've basically given up on any emulator restrictions as they would just drive people to use the alternate app stores coming.
On the one hand happy for the emulation scene as it establishes it's legitimacy and hopefully a more secure future. But to see it on apple, which stands against what open source development represents... oh well. Most people in this world can't afford their shiny products, or take a hit in order to fit in.
@IntrepidWombat it’s not that it wasn’t possible, it’s that it wasn’t allowed. Recently Apple flipped the switch to allow emulators.
Downloaded the app on my iPad today. When I booted up a game, a very obtrusive ad popped up, one of those really garbage ones that try to trick you into interacting with it, and taking a long time to show the x to close it.
When I finally got to the game, it displayed in the wrong aspect ratio. I tried to fix it in the settings, but there were no options for that. Went back to the game, and another ad popped up.
I went back to the App Store to check if I got the right app, and noticed that the developer’s other app is a 99 cent ad blocker. That seemed pretty shady to me, so I deleted the app immediately.
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