Archive for July 29th, 2008

The new version of the popular NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch now includes accelerometer control for all games. The implementation is very simple: A tilt is equivalent to controlling input in that direction. This means that tilt control can be used in any game loaded into the emulator, but also that some of the controls are pretty much balls. Also, this app does not live in the official app store. NES.app 2.3.0 with tilt control is available now in Cydia.

As seen in the video, controlling Mario is fairly natural, though quick turns and exact jumps are difficult to execute (playing Mario with the stock controls is often worse, though). Bomberman sort of works, but in that case—and many others—the old touch control overlay is much easier. Obviously none of these games were designed with tilt control in mind, but a surprising number are at least playable.

via gizmodo

This video walkthrough of MagicPad, a rich text editor app that is still pending acceptance into the App Store, is notable for showing the first working copy and paste framework on the iPhone (at the 1:00 mark). Of course, SDK limitations keep the functionality quarantined within MagicPad itself, but its developers, Proximi, hope to use it as a case study for pushing forward one of the iPhone software's most wanted features.

via gizmodo

Related posts:

• Copy/Paste might appear in firmware 2.1
• Copy/paste on IPhone

Apple's Fairplay DRM, which protects all the applications you download from iTunes, has been hacked. The method for hacking this has actually been around for a while, but has been recently applied to Super Monkey Ball and distributed into the wild. To do this, you'll need a jailbroken iPhone and SSH installed (to transfer the game and to fiddle with permissions). The theory is a bit techy and complex, but the execution isn't too insane. iPhone developers are disappointed about this

The big winners in Apple's new online App Store are gamemakers, who dominated sales in the week since the new iPhone 3G hit stores.

Seven of the top 10 paid applications, including the top five, were video games, led by Sega's Super Monkey Ball, a rolling racing game. Even among the free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, which include popular social networking sites like Facebook and the Internet radio service Pandora, the top title is Tap Tap Revenge, a rhythm game similar to Guitar Hero.

These 10 titles sold the best in the iTunes App Store:

1. Super Monkey Ball (Sega) games

2. Texas Hold 'Em (Apple) games

3. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3-D (Vivendi) games

4. Enigmo (Pangea Studios) games
5. Tetris (EA) games

6. iBeer (Hotrix) entertainment

7. Recorder (Retronyms) utilities

8. Solitaire (MobilityWare) games

9. Units (Crossword Solutions) utilities

10. Scrabble (EA) games