By all accounts it's a bit of a mess but then, that's what you get when you muck around with this kind of business. There's sloppy framerates and poor controls all over the shop.

On the bright side, it supports the...Wii Remote?

N64 Emulator Hits Jailbroken iPhones, With Bluetooth Wiimote Support

Touch Arcade points out that "a number of apps in the App Store" already violate that provision, including:

[...] CHIP-8 emulators, programmable calculators and, of course, Frotz, a Z-machine interpreter. In fact, Sega's Golden Axe and Sonic iPhone games are nothing more than emulators packaged with the original game ROMs.

The app was denied last week; no word on what the next step is for the developers. But since they went to the trouble of signing a proper deal with the license owners for the Commodore 64, it's a good bet they won't give up the first time they're told no.

Otherwise, there's always Cydia. Make it happen, guys. I dig that old school keyboard and Wico stick interface.

Here's a video of the emulator in action.

Full Commodore 64 Emulator Rejected by App Store [Touch Arcade via Joystiq]

Hackaday reader Matthias rigged up this solution, which makes the cart show up on a PC as an external drive with the ROM file inside. From there, it's playable on one's choice of emulator.

Admittedly, the number of cases in which one has a working cart but no working console, and a working emulator but no working ROM, are probably quite low. But I remember Dad asking me what was the point - when free WiFi is so plentiful - of jailbreaking my iPhone and rigging it to serve as a dialup modem for my laptop. "Self esteem," I said.

In other words, whatever this thing does for you isn't important; the thing you made it do, however, is. Good work, Matthias.

USB Reader for SNES Game Carts [hackaday]

Full-time thinking man and part-time Kotaku Guest Editor Ian Bogost has asked some kids at Georgia Tech to come up with an emulator that can not only recreate an old game on a new platform, but recreate how it actually looked back in its day.

For example, the Atari 2600 was designed to run on 1970s TV sets. Big, clunky, cathode ray TV sets, on which a pixel looked a lot different than it does a crystal-clear monitor or HD TV set. So the GT computer science students have created some tweaks for the popular Stella emulator, which are able to recreate the way a game would have looked on a dusty, wood-panelled television set.

The results are, for this misty-eyed nostalgic, wonderful. Bogost says talks are currently underway to have these tweaks incorporated into Stella's release builds, so hopefully they'll be made available to the public soon.

A Television Simulator [Ian Bogost]

It basically turns Super Mario Bros. 3 into a fairly capable looking Kirby's Canvas Curse clone, with a custom script that let's Mario "rainbow ride" on platforms drawn by a mouse. The script also disables the player's control of Mario, forcing the plumber to walk in one direction until he hits an obstacle.

Using the mouse, players must guide Mario to the exit, destroying enemies with lines of rainbow power and drawing ramps. A very clever modification to this classic game.

Using the mouse, players can wield Goombas and Koopas like some sort of Mushroom Kingdom deity, often with amusing, potentially brain-melting results. This isn't necessarily a function of FCEUX, but looks to be a custom Lua script that lets the player manipulate tiles and enemy sprites for originally unintended Mario manipulation.

We're not sure if this is currently Super Mario Bros. specific, or if we could, say, make Mega Man 2 a hell of a lot easier with our crappy Logitech mouse. It's not currently publicly released, but we hope that's remedied soon. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to Chris for the heads up.

Super Mario Bros. 1 Drag & Drop (FCEUX 2.1 + Lua) [YouTube]

Welcome to "Bella's Arcade," built by James, who has built and restored other arcade cabinets. This cabinet is built 80 percent to scale, so little ones can play it standing straight up, while adults would have to sit down to see the screen fully. He put in a Windows 98 machine that boots up to a MAME custom skinned with the Bella's Arcade theme. Players can choose from 250 arcade classics.

For me, the best feature about this is the coin box. Instead of crediting your game with a button on the dash, you press the coin slot - or you can insert a coin. And why not, this is the age when kids get piggy banks, too. Good work, daddy! Someone got a huge, huge neckhug when this rolled in.

Bella's Arcade [production blog]

Like the GP2X, it runs a Linux-based OS, has a GBA-ish form factor and is wide open for homebrew developers to code original games and — always the killer GP2x app — emulation, emulation, emulation.

Unlike its ancestor, it has a 533MHZ Arm 9 processor with 3D acceleration, 64MB of Ram and a touchscreen. There is only the one screen, so DS emulation is fairly unlikely, but there are already some touchscreen games and apps in the pipeline as you can see in this ridiculously large picture. Long JPG is loooong.

Also new is support for Flash 7.0 which should open up the possibility of playing web-based games that you manage to get on an SD card by whatever means necessary. There is no wifi, which is a shame, but you can't have everything.

The Wiz is available for pre-order now at around $179.99 , due out in October.

Building a MAME console inside a TARDIS [ASCIIMATION via Wired Gadgets]

Only donors of the developer's last projects will be invited to the early beta, but we'll keep an eye out for the final release so you can spend your time worrying about other things, like "do these shoes look good with this phone, or do I need to burn them immediately?"

[psx4all NEWS] Playstation has arrived on the iPhone and iPod Touch! [via infiniteloop]

Hi - a good friend of mine has managed to get this working on XNA.... He's still got a bit to do but I thought I'd tip you before the other sites get wind of it! Sound is a problem at the moment due to the way XNA works (maybe this will change in the future).

When I first got my PSP I was all about the homebrew. I made custom backgrounds for my savegames and etc. One time, while waiting for a flight at an airport, I got so involved in my homebrew DOOM game that I missed my plane by about an hour. After that, I lost my taste for the elaborate fiddling that goes into getting homebrew to run.

But with a functional PSX emulator available, I may be about to get back into the fray.

Yoshihiro has released the first public release of his PSX-P Playstation One emulator for the PSP. This first public release is a good demonstration of what could be in time an excellent Playstation Emulator for the PSP, once a dynarec is built in then Sony will have reason to worry or worry us .

This emulator works on PSPs from ver1.0 to v2.71 obviously after v1.5 youll need to use the Eloader.

So it sounds like the overall speed is currently not great, but this is undoubtedly the beginning of something beautiful. Eliza Gauger

original forum post here [DCEMU, thanks Hyperion]

Emulation hound on the go-go? Check out this foldable, portable gamepad from Geekstuff4U.

Called simply the 'Pocket Gamepad', it's a stylish, silver-sprayed knock off of the SNES style controller, with an extra couple of trigger buttons for good measure. It also has programmable autofire. A detachable USB cable leads from the pad to your port.

It's a bit more pricy at $30.68 than I'd be willing to spend just to play some portable MAME shmups, but it's certainly a snazzy exercise in foldability. Florian Eckhardt

Pocket GamePad [Geekstuff4U] (via Racketboy)

Holy crap! After over a year of flustering, flummoxing and thwarting the most quick-witted emulation programmers, the No$GBA guys have finally cracked Nintendo DS commercial roms and gotten them to run in emulated form.

It's not perfect by any means: the major hurdle of sound emulation is not yet supported. Neither is WLAN emulation. But it's a start.

We are, of course, not condoning piracy, but neither do we believe emulation either illegal or immoral. In fact, I think it's well within your rights as a consumer. So don't pirate DS games... it's a solid system. But hell, if you've ripped some DS carts anytime in the past, go on over to the No$gba homepage and try it out. Florian Eckhardt

No$GBA DS Emulator [Official Site]

Looks like someone besides hyperactive fan boys (we count ourselves amongst their noble ranks) have noticed Nintendo's recent tendency for running off at the patent mouth. The Electronics Frontier Foundation have updated their list of Top 10 patent abusers and number 8 on the list? Well, we spoiled it in the first sentence... it's Nintendo!

In particular, they are upset by Nintendo's attempt to patent emulation, which is protected under fair-use doctrine. Said Jason Schultz at the EFF:

. "A bunch of small game companies are writing these emulators, and they're really no threat to Nintendo,"

Of course, big video game companies trying to squash emulation development is nothing new. But patenting emulation as a whole? It's hard to look at that as anything less than delusional. Florian Eckhardt

EFF Publishes Patent Hit List [Wired]

Up to 7,000 PSOne games emulated on the PSP by the end of 2007. That's what Sony is promising.

There's no release date or further details (like, HELLO! Pricing?), but Sony did confirm for the UK PSP Magazine that Tomb Raider, Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy VII and VIII and Silent Hill.

That's a pretty exciting attempt to shore up the PSP's games line-up, although we're curious if these emulated versions will nix attempts to release Tomb Raider and Silent Hill remakes. But 7,000 games? Yes, they used the dreaded qualifier 'up to' but that's a bold claim that can only be good for those of us who haven't yet flushed our PSPs down the toilet. Crecente, I'm looking at you. Florian Eckhardt

New PSOne Emulation Details [Advanced Media PSP]

Ah, the early days of emulation! When the legal ground was murky (or, at least, slightly more contested) and companies flagrantly sold emulators to the public. The Colecovision pulled it back in the 80's and the Dreamcast did it in the late 90's through Bleem.

I never owned a PS1 but I did have a Dreamcast. Bleemcast was the answer to my penny-pinching prayers: finally, I could play the same games my friends were raving about. Unfortunately, it didn't work all that well: the games that it did support were pretty at twice their native resolution, but support was scant and the graphics tended to exhibit lots of little quirks.

Still, it's fun to reminisce about less cynical emulating times. So we're pointing you to this great read over at Retrogames about the life and times of the short lived, quickly obliterated Bleemcast emulating software. Apparently, the software has been modded since then to add support for even more games. Fat lot of good that does me a decade ago without a flux capacitated DeLorean. Florian Eckhardt

Bleemcast: Playstation Games On Your Dreamcast [Retro Gaming]

An interesting idea, but it introduces a weird problem: this means that earlier PS3s will be fully backwards compatible where as later model PS3s will likely not be, as PS2 games will be running under emulation, which always tends to be a bit finickier.

Too bad they can't cram a PS1 in there while they're at it. FLORIAN ECKHARDT

Sony Bundles PS2 With PS3 [IGN]

This smacks of "only possible with an emulator" but there are so many mind-blowing feats of caped Mario acrobatics in this video that it must be seen. WARNING: If you have an aversion to bad music Linkin Park, quickly hit the mute button and add your own custom soundtrack. Michael McWhertor

Microsoft actually may be able to compete with the Nintendo Wii's virtual console service like this. Simply license up emulated ports and sell them for a buck or two a pop. There's certainly no hardware functionality outside the controller that Nintendo has that Microsoft doesn't. It's nice to see that the current generation of consoles are the ones that finally embrace emulation, as opposed to spurning it as something criminal.

E3 2006: Live Arcade Line-up Part 2 [IGN]