If you acted fast last night, you could have had a NES emulator for your iPhone. For just a few short hours, the emulator Nescaline was live on the App Store. But once buzz about the emulator started creeping around the Internet, it was yanked from the App Store. This leaves only one question: how did it even go live in the first place? Apple has had little trouble rejecting games and apps with what it considers questionable content, from gore or sexually-oriented material to suspected malicious code. Yet a NES emulator goes live?
While live, Nescaline cost $6.99 and did not ship with any ROMs. But you can easily find NES ROMs on the Internet and save them for use with his emulator. Nescaline creator Jonathan Zdziarski blogged about his removed app today, saying:
One of the more useless people at Apple called me to let me know that Nescaline was removed because it was an emulator. Ironically, Apple currently has several emulators in the AppStore, so I am going with the belief that someone (likely Nintendo) probably pressured them about this particular application. I'm rather shocked at the thought that Apple is such a pushover that they'll cave to pressure from any third party out there.
What could he possibly be shocked about? Nescaline plays ROMs. Nintendo still owns the rights to the NES. Yes, his code allegedly did not contain any copyrighted material from Nintendo and was all done via software reverse engineering. But these emulators are designed not just to play homebrew games. They are designed to play ROMs of old NES games.
There's another reason the emulator was likely pulled: money. Apple makes mucho dinero through selling games for the iPhone. An emulator that allows people to play free content, legal or illegal, stands to eat into that business. The App Store is a walled garden. Apple makes the rules. Everybody knows this. If Apple wants to pull an app from its own App Store that threatens its business, it is well within its rights to do so.
This should not necessarily be the end of the road for Nescaline, though. I'd like to see NES-style homebrew games on the App Store. Perhaps the solution is not an emulator that can be used to play illegally-obtained ROMs. Instead, the tech could power single-game releases.
This is not the first time Apple has pulled an emulator from the App Store. A Commodore 64 emulator has been on and off the App Store for some time. A Duck Hunt rip was yanked off the stage. And even though Nescaline is a memory, there is now a Nintendo 64 emulator for jailbroken iPhones on the "other" app store, called Cydia. The creator of the N64 emulator, ZodTTD, has even come up with a hack that lets you play iPhone games with the Wii Remote. That includes MAME games, too, which are playable through a MAME emulator also created by ZodTTD.
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While live, Nescaline cost $6.99 and did not ship with any ROMs. But you can easily find NES ROMs on the Internet and save them for use with his emulator. Nescaline creator Jonathan Zdziarski blogged about his removed app today, saying:
One of the more useless people at Apple called me to let me know that Nescaline was removed because it was an emulator. Ironically, Apple currently has several emulators in the AppStore, so I am going with the belief that someone (likely Nintendo) probably pressured them about this particular application. I'm rather shocked at the thought that Apple is such a pushover that they'll cave to pressure from any third party out there.
What could he possibly be shocked about? Nescaline plays ROMs. Nintendo still owns the rights to the NES. Yes, his code allegedly did not contain any copyrighted material from Nintendo and was all done via software reverse engineering. But these emulators are designed not just to play homebrew games. They are designed to play ROMs of old NES games.
There's another reason the emulator was likely pulled: money. Apple makes mucho dinero through selling games for the iPhone. An emulator that allows people to play free content, legal or illegal, stands to eat into that business. The App Store is a walled garden. Apple makes the rules. Everybody knows this. If Apple wants to pull an app from its own App Store that threatens its business, it is well within its rights to do so.
This should not necessarily be the end of the road for Nescaline, though. I'd like to see NES-style homebrew games on the App Store. Perhaps the solution is not an emulator that can be used to play illegally-obtained ROMs. Instead, the tech could power single-game releases.
This is not the first time Apple has pulled an emulator from the App Store. A Commodore 64 emulator has been on and off the App Store for some time. A Duck Hunt rip was yanked off the stage. And even though Nescaline is a memory, there is now a Nintendo 64 emulator for jailbroken iPhones on the "other" app store, called Cydia. The creator of the N64 emulator, ZodTTD, has even come up with a hack that lets you play iPhone games with the Wii Remote. That includes MAME games, too, which are playable through a MAME emulator also created by ZodTTD.
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