‘Gridlee’ appears to be just another retro-style arcade game with tacked-on touch controls. But look closer, and you’ll find an entire arcade emulator.
Photo from idownloadblog.com.
Apple doesn’t typically allow emulators on their closed iOS platform, with very few exceptions. Apple typically falls back on the defense that they’re protecting users from potentially malicious code that can be run through an emulated system, which is technically true, although some have debated this logic. The more likely rationale is that Apple doesn’t want to have to deal with DMCA enforcement problems and cease-and-desist orders from game companies when users start loading illegally downloaded ROM images of their games onto iDevices through their marketplace.
In order to get around Apple’s App Store regulations and play emulated games on their iDevices, users typically jailbreak them and load third-party apps. Back in 2011 a port of popular emulator MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) had been released under the moniker ‘iMAME’, which was quickly removed by Apple. But now a new app has surfaced on the App Store, going by the name ‘Gridlee‘.
At first glance, the Gridlee app appears to be just another retro-style arcade game with tacked-on touch controls. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find an entire arcade emulator hidden in the app’s source files. Just plug in your iDevice, and use iExplorer to navigate to Gridlee’s ROMs folder, and upload as many ROM files as your device can handle. Not all games are supported, however, so quality may be hit or miss. Gridlee’s emulator even supports iCade’s physical controls.
At least one App Store customer has caught on based on their review, and I’m sure more will follow suit, which means Apple will likely catch on and pull the plug on Gridlee for good relatively soon. Until then, you can grab a fistful of ROMs and head on down to the App Store for some old-school arcade action.
As it turns out, having an “$” in your name makes it a whole lot easier to be generous in paying for your mistakes, as evidenced by “Micro$oft”‘s latest in a series of costly apologies to customers. When called out over a bug which disabled the split-screen multiplayer feature of the 360 release of Minecraft for some users, Xbox corporate offered affected users a full refund. Say what you will about the Microsoft company history, but their Games Division’s ability to guilt trip their higher-ups into doing right by their mistakes continues to impress me.
As a soon-to-be-former RIT student(!), I’ve interacted with Microsoft’s games division on multiple occasions. Far from representing the cutthroat corporate culture the company became synonymous with in the 1990’s, these Microsoft guys were relaxed, fun, innovative, creative… the total antithesis of the Microsoft I grew up with.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in their reaction to the homebrewing cottage industry which sprang up in the wake of Kinect’s release. 90’s Microsoft would’ve responded with Cease-and-Desist’s; last year’s Microsoft cheered on when a tech company put out a bounty to the first person or group to successfully create open-source drivers for the peripheral (although to be fair, they did flip-flop a bit first). 90’s M$ would have bought out all the startups working with their licensed tech, and gutted them; today’s MS houses several companies working on Kinect apps.
They may not be perfect, but I think Microsoft deserves a decent amount of credit for trying to change their ways, and for giving the Xbox division the freedom it needs to earn the trust and respect of this generation of gamers.
SimCity 2000 for 3 bucks!! I have my old Mac LC III still plugged in in my room back home, specifically to play this game.
I want all of these for my new apartment.
These are some original concept sketches for Spyro the Dragon, from right before when the character became Insomniac’s mascot, heralding in the era of PlayStation-branded 3D platforming games which continued on through the lifespan of the PS and PS2.
The sketches above come from an archive hosted…
What Is?
Hey! I'm Mike, this is my blog. and my dream is to use my middling tech skills to make the world a better place (not in the techno-libertarian, "the world is a better place if I get mine" sense, but in the actual, "I want to help" sense).
