Re: bounty for emulator

I would aim for something releasable on Apple's app store or I wouldn't bother.  There is no public jailbreak for the 4S or the iPad 2, and Cydia is cluttered with an amazing amount of crash-tacular junk.  With no working baseband unlock, there is almost no reason for anyone to jailbreak an iOS device at this point other than because they can.  If your market is only geeks who will tolerate a crashy phone just because they take delight in jailbreaking it, it's too small to bother with.

There are probably ways to work around the BASIC interpreter issue with Apple's developer TOS - for example by interacting with dev support from Apple to ensure that BASIC is sandboxed within the app, and maybe by adding some gold-plating such as including some intro to programming material for C64 BASIC alongside it.  Apple seems to have relaxed this restriction however, so I don't imagine it being a big problem.

You might run into the idiocy that resulted in VLC being removed from the app store as well - if VICE contains GPL code.  I love how we all suffer due to RMS's idiotic religion that for some reason prevents free software from being distributed for free...  I believe the inability to share the DRM'd binary was the restriction in this case.  I think there are potential workarounds for this, but it didn't come together for VLC.

Justin

On Oct 27, 2011, at 06:54 , Mike Paull wrote:

> Is anyone interested in participating in a bounty for porting the Vice x64 emulator to the Ipad?
>  
> Because the C64 emulator released by Manomio has been locked down (no basic, no keyboard, no ability to add your own .d64 images) to the point where it is just a platform to play the games they distribute through their in app purchase scheme, many people have become frustrated and disappointed to the stage where it becomes a chore to use it, and therefore don’t.
>  
> Although there have been methods described which allow your own .D64 images to be added into the emulator, it is clumsy and time consuming and far removed from the ease with which you would do the same in, for example, Vice. I am aware that hacks exist to enable access to basic and add the missing colon character, however that still leaves us with a severely crippled emulator.
>  
> The catalyst for this email was discovering a port of the Vice x64 emulator on the Android market place. Surely, if it can be done for Android it can be done for the Ipad.
>  
> Obviously this would be an application for jailbroken devices as it is doubtful Apple would approve it. I imagine the finished product would be distributed through Cydia.
>  
> Kernal and 1541 DOS rom files would be needed. As Jim Brain is now the legal distributer of JiffyDOS products, and now sells the image files, he would be the source for legal versions of these roms. Naturally any documentation supplied with the emulator would provide a link to his web store, infact, having a clickable link inside the app itself would be a good idea too.
>  
> I understand that commodorebounty.com no longer exists ( not sure what happened, it is no longer resolving ) and I have not set up a bounty before, so I would need some help there.
>  
> I am not a programmer, my contribution would be financial and perhaps documentation.
>  
> Is the community interested in this?
>  
> Mike
>  
>  
>  


       Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list