I'm an emulator nut as I love retro gaming and while I've decided to refrain from reviewing emulators they are high on the list of reasons why I went Android over iPhone... so this is important news to me.
As per the above Engadget link (click on thist post's title), which I came across solely by chance today, Google has suspended emulator maker yongzh's account and removed all of his emulators from the Android market. In a nutshell, as the Android platform grows companys like Sega and Nintendo are taking more notice to the "wild west" nature of the Android market and the massive amount of copyright violations that go on there. However, in an odd response, Google has pulled all of one developer's apps leaving not only many of these other "roms" available, but also countless other emulators including competing ones. This response by Google makes little sense and leaves me wondering if there's more to it.
However, all of these emulators are available at slideme.org (another source for Android apps) including the recently removed Nintendo 64 one which can be downloaded here: http://slideme.org/application/n64oid. I've downloaded it and it's quite stunning. The article would have me believe that these are full versions of the emulators, but I see there's a link in the program to get the full version from the Android market so I suspect these are the demos (where the main difference is the inability to save your game state).
Note that the suspension is more likely due to complaints from the authors of the open source emulators he is ripping off than complains from Sega/Nintendo.
ReplyDelete(http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/hmwj7/android_markets_most_popular_emulators_disappear/)