iPod fans evade Apple’s DRM to preserve 54 lost clickwheel-era games
Dozens of previously hard-to-access games can now be synced via Virtual Machine.
I had completely forgotten about iPod games! I think there was one called Vortex that I liked a lot and there was also game version of the show LOST that I only played because I was a mega-fan of the show that was otherwise very frustrating.
Also a great example of why DRM sucks.
This is taking me back to playing a barely controllable homebrew port of Doom on my jailbroken ipod video.
Oh wow, I totally forgot about doing that as well! I think I spent the better part of a day getting it work, then “played” it for all of two or three minutes.
I remember playing it under Rockbox on some media player. I don't even remember what it was, now, but it was a solid little device.
I wanna say I had sonic 2 installed? And it was about as controllable as you'd imagine with the scrollwheel lol.
I never tried Sonic on the iPod, but I bet it was ridiculous to control!
That's great. But how long until I can play Balatro on my iPod Classic?
(I love that indie devs occasionally port their games to nonsensical or obsolete platforms)
Edit: I actually think Balatro would translate fairly well; assuming the iPod Classic has enough ram and CPU to run a visually stripped-down version. When I had an iPod Nano I played solitaire almost obsessively. The controls were a bit slow due to the limitations of using a clickwheel, but they actually worked really well.
On a side note: does anyone know if capacitive clickwheels still under patent, trademark or whatever was keeping other companies from using them? I loved the way the iPod clickwheel felt and it sucked that no one else had a 1:1 replication of it.
Portmaster is amazing.
iPod mini was the first with the capacitive touch wheel with integrated buttons. It came out in 2004 and patents usually only last 20 years, so it should be fine to use the tech as long as you don't use an apple logo, or any of the advancements they made in 2005 or later.
Apple offered a Ms. Pac-Man port on these devices for a while, and it was surprisingly good.
