Since Apple opened up the App Store to emulators, it’s on everyone’s mind which emulators will be smaller. The popular PPSSPP emulator is available on Android and PC, and this week the developer confirmed that it is ready to bring it to the iPhone.
It’s pretty exciting, although for some of us the PSP was mostly an excuse to play Final Fantasy Tactics again.
Android Authority has confirmed that PPSSPP creator Henrik Rydgård will make an iOS version of the emulator. However, he stated that Apple will have to allow users to choose and load their own ROMs on their phones.
“Since we don’t own the rights to the PSP games, we can’t offer them as an in-app download, users still have to get the games themselves (by ditching the UMDs),” Rydgård wrote in a blog post. “So for PPSSPP to be useful beyond launching a small set of free-to-play homegrown games depends on how Apple interprets its own rules.”
For those who don’t know, emulators are like consoles on a computer or phone. They don’t really organize any games; users have to download ROMs that run the emulator. How a user obtains these ROMs can vary from throwing away their own physical media to illegal piracy.
Many apps in Apple’s ecosystem have to host in-app downloads, which emulators can’t because developers don’t own the rights to the games.
Yesterday, Apple confirmed to MacRumors that emulators can use downloaded ROMs. The catch, however, is that the app can only emulate retro console games, not anything that’s considered modern.
It’s unclear what Apple considers retro. Nothing we’ve read definitively states when the clock starts for the system to be considered retro for Apple. At this point the PSP is 20 years old and hasn’t been supported since 2014. The Nintendo Wii came out in 2006. Would this be acceptable for an iOS emulator (pending Nintendo’s desire to send out cease and desist letters)? These questions need to be answered.
The launch of the emulator on iOS did not go smoothly. Just this week, Apple had to remove one of the first emulators from the App Store due to spam and copyright infringement. For example, the iGBA application that Apple removed was specifically for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, which was released in 2001.
For reference, the PSP launched in 2004. The obvious consoles like the NES, Super NES, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and N64 make sense for iOS, but the line for consoles like the PSP is blurry.
That said, Henrik Rydgard seems confident that PPSSPP will come to iOS if users can choose their own emulator downloads. Since Apple has confirmed that users can do this, perhaps the PSP is considered retro or the developer is counting on Apple not removing it despite the console being newer than the GBA.