Delta Game Emulator Now Available From the App Store

Everything is coming up Milhouse this week for Riley Testut. Juli Clover for MacRumors:

Game emulator apps have come and gone since Apple announced App Store support for them on April 5, but now popular game emulator Delta from developer Riley Testut is available for download. [...]

Delta is an all-in-one emulator that supports game systems including NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance. It works with popular game controllers, and supports cheats, save states, backups, syncing, and more. As this is Testut’s longtime project, it is more polished and feature rich than other emulators that have popped up. [...]

Delta can be downloaded from the App Store for free, and it does not collect information or include ads. The app is available in the United States and other countries, but it is not available in the European Union where it is instead being offered through an alternative app marketplace.

An incredibly polished, high-performance game emulator, available free of charge with no ads. That’s some old-school internet awesomeness. (App Store link.)

The alternative app marketplace for EU denizens to get Delta is Testut’s own AltStore PAL. (Delta is free there, too, but AltStore PAL requires a €1.50/year subscription to cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee.)

Now the questions is: Does Nintendo care? Nintendo recently shut down Yuzu, a popular open source Switch emulator. (David Pierce and Sean Hollister made a great episode of Decoder about this whole saga.) There’s a big difference between emulating the Switch — which is still current — and emulating classic consoles, but Nintendo still monetizes those classic consoles via emulation on the Switch.

Update: 24 hours later and Delta is the #1 app in the App Store. You love to see it. David Smith:

While the App Store is far from perfect, seeing Delta sustain its position at the top of the App Store is a lovely reminder of its best feature.

That an indie developer can dedicate years honing their craft and then create something so compelling that it beats out apps from trillion-dollar companies, enriching the lives of millions of people along the way.

That’s beautiful. That’s inspiring. And just plain awesome.

★ Wednesday, 17 April 2024