A wave of emulators is starting to roll out to Apple platforms, including the Vision Pro, as Joy-Cons and other official gamepads prove to be useful input accessories.
Before Apple even publicly signaled changes to its App Store policies inviting this type of software to its store, a limited-run TestFlight began populating Vision Pro for a Game Boy Advance emulator. Today, the widely used Project Delta launched on all current Apple devices with emulation for a wide range of decades-old Nintendo gaming systems: Game Boy, DS, NES, SNES, and 64.
“Wherever possible, Nintendo and its licensees try to find ways to bring legitimate classics to current systems (through Virtual Console titles, for example),” Nintendo notes in an FAQ on its website.
Nintendo doesn’t offer a path to that Virtual Console on any non-Nintendo hardware currently. There are Xbox streaming, Steam streaming, and PlayStation streaming available in various incarnations on the Apple, Meta, and Google app stores.
Last year, Apple shared its Apple Vision Pro launch event with Disney as its primary content partner.
This year, Apple is unveiling its next big feature and information debut in June at its WWDC event. Could Apple somehow surprise everyone and renew its partnership with Nintendo for a new era, including the Vision Pro?
Older gamers and retro fans have created a growing set of open-source repositories and hardware tools to keep the best video games of the 20th century alive. In some cases, fans also restore or extend original functionality. For example, despite the potential for piracy and misuse, rescuing Pokémon from a dead battery in a 30-year-old box of Game Boy cartridges is the same preservation process as backing up game files.
When it comes to virtual reality, headsets like the PSVR 2 or Vision Pro can use the high frame rates and true blacks of their OLED displays as a more flexible canvas on which to render the overall texture of classic games.
In the specific case of the Vision Pro, the multitasking capabilities of the visionOS operating system may even begin to seem like a real analogy to classic games.
What’s stopping one of these new emulator apps from connecting to the Vision Pro Television app because the latter has a filter that captures the feel of a ’90s cathode ray tube? And how is that different for the user from running an RGB cable through their VCR to the TV in the 1990s?
One major difference is that gamers like me are much older now, while Nintendo and Apple have become huge multinational organizations that employ government liaisons and vast legal apparatuses to protect their interests on a global scale. The official Nintendo site asks us the question: “But can’t I make a backup copy if I own the video game?”
Nintendo’s lawyers also respond:
“You may be thinking about the backup/archive exception under US Law. There is misinformation on the Internet about this backup/archive exception. This is a very narrow limitation that extends to the computer software.
Video games are made up of numerous types of copyrighted works and should not be classified as software alone. Therefore, the backup provisions would not apply to copyrighted video game works. and specifically to ROM downloads, which are generally unauthorized and infringing.
The last frontier of emulation?
It is chilling language to suggest that people contribute to open-source repositories so that they can preserve for themselves and the future the very texture of their childhood.
There are several generations of people around the world raised on Nintendo games who have encoded the timing of the required button presses into their central memories. Meanwhile, Google recently demonstrated how to use AI trained on videos to create games from them.
It’s easy to see why Nintendo wants to protect its ownership to employ developers and create more games in this new era. But with emulation growing in headsets like Quest with CitraVR and Delta in visionOS, brands like Atari, Sega, and, yes, Nintendo, will have to keep up with the millennial kids they helped raise.
LAN parties recreated on phones and headsets? Split-screen multiplayer separated between virtual reality and television? Officially licensed games driven by nostalgia, like Atari’s partnership with Pixel Ripped 1978?
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