Play your favorite homebrew for 20-30 year old consoles!
While the negatives are what have been at the forefront of our coverage of Apple’s third-party stores, there’s good things happening, too. And one of those good things has actually made the leap to the actual App Store. And that thing is the Delta emulator.
Delta is now available on the official App Store everywhere but the EU. For those in the EU, though, it can be obtained through recently launched AltStore PAL, one of those third-party stores mentioned earlier.
This marks a pretty big turning point for the App store. It’s a recent development that Apple even allows emulators on the App Store. Delta is the first, and extra notable as it covers almost a full 15 years worth of Nintendo systems: from the NES to the N64, The Game Boy to the DS, and even the Sega Genesis, with promises of more to come.
In addition, it supports a full range of popular bluetooth controllers, Including not only conventional options like the Xbox One/Series X and PS4/PS5 controllers, but also Nintendo’s own Joy Cons, as well as the Nintendo Online controllers for the NES, SNES, and N64. Moreover, you can customize these controller layouts, add dedicated buttons for save states. You can also have it hold buttons for you.
And for those games that are Nintendo-different, it’s also got you covered. For example, games like WarioWare: Twisted! or Yoshi’s Topsy Turvey, which used in-cart gyroscopes to control the action, it will use your phone’s gyroscope. About the only offbeat controls it can’t really do anything about would be Boktai‘s solar sensor.
Delta can also scrape box art, and even implement custom box art for games if you so wish. It also supports up to 4-player multiplayer on NES, SNES, and N64 games, as well as AirPlay streaming.
Technically, Delta wasn’t the first emulator on the App Store; it was beaten to the punch by iGBA and Bimmy. iGBA was a direct ripoff of Delta-developer Riley Testut’s previous emulator GBA4iOS, and was taken down due to spam and copyright App Store rule violations. Bimmy, on the other hand, was taken down by its developer in the wake of Nintendo’s recent war on emulators.
Delta isn’t a new app, though. Testut has been working on it continuously since 2019, when he launched it via the afore mentioned AltStore. This means, for those wondering, that Delta’s probably already in a pretty good, stable state. And with more promised to be on the way, it’s only going to get better. You know, assuming there isn’t some massive DMCA mess.
Source: The Verge
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