Game Boy emulators for iPhone are nothing new but they are hard to come by. Jailbreak users have always had options like GBA.emu and gpSPhone, while more careful iOS users who haven’t jailbroken have relied on GBA4iOS. Now from the developer of the latter app comes Delta, an iPhone emulator that doesn’t require jailbreak that promises to play Game Boy, N64 and Super Nintendo ROMs.
Motherboard recently tested the app, which is due for release in early 2017 with a beta due before the end of the month. Here’s what we found.
Videos by VICE
Image: Xavier Harding/Motherboard
Delta Lets You Play Game Boy Games Right On Your iPhone, No Jailbreak Needed
Delta was first teased last month on Twitter when the app’s developer asked fans to say goodbye to GBA4iOS, the studio’s previous Game Boy emulator for iPhone. The app allows you to save ROMs to your phone and play them right on your device.
“Working on GBA4iOS was the highlight of my developer career,” said Delta’s Riley Testut. GBA4iOS exploited a loophole in iOS that allowed users to bypass the App Store and download the app directly to their iPhones, something that typically can only be done with a jailbroken iPhone. “When Apple [in 2014] closed the loophole in iOS 8.1 I immediately began thinking of what would come next,” he said. “I initially planned an SNES emulator but realized I could do much more with the project.”
Enter Delta.
ROMs can be moved over from Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and can also be transferred with a USB cable using iTunes. Firing up a Game Boy Advance game on your iPhone using Delta looks like this:
Image: Xavier Harding/Motherboard
Delta users can play games in portrait or landscape orientation. The emulator also allows players to set how transparent they want onscreen buttons to look when the phone is held sideways.
The beta we tested was only able to properly play Game Boy Advance and Super Nintendo games; N64 games simply didn’t import into the app, though that could merely be a pre-release bug.
There are some tradeoffs by not playing Game Boy games on actual Nintendo hardware, of course. For one, virtual controls don’t have the same feeling as pressing a physical button, which can make some games like Mario Kart: Super Circuit or F-Zero Maximum Velocity difficult to actually play. Others, like the Pokémon series or Fire Emblem, that don’t require timely button inputs are better suited for Delta.
Image: Xavier Harding/Motherboard
At any moment during gameplay, users are able to pause Delta to return to bring up a menu. This is where users can save and load game states (to resume playing from that point later), input Game Shark-like cheat codes and enable auto-fire. Selecting the red Main Menu text brings you to the game selection screen, allowing you to switch to a different title in your library.
Actually playing the games like Pokémon Fire Red and Advance Wars on Delta runs smoothly, even for beta software. There was little to no slowdown during gameplay and audio only stuttered briefly when entering the game from a different menu inside the app. Aside from this, audio and video ran clean.
Image: Xavier Harding/Motherboard
How Does Delta Compare To GBA4iOS?
People who’ve used GBA4iOS will feel largely at home playing Delta, which is an altogether more polished experience. Your ROM library now consists of thumbnail images for your games (assuming your ROMs are named properly), and support has been added for the iPhone 7’s taptic engine. The vibration that occurs when you tap an onscreen, virtual button wouldn’t fool anyone into thinking a physical button had been pressed, but it’s a nice addition.
Not everything is perfect, though. Compared to GBA4iOS, Delta makes it slightly harder to load up on ROMs: While the current method of using Dropbox or Google Drive to load games is easy, being able to download .zip files directly into GBA4iOS was even easier. This feature most likely won’t be coming back, Delta’s developers said, as they got into trouble for including it in the past.
Delta also lacks any hints towards multiplayer; at the moment, playing iPhone-to-iPhone isn’t possible, though this could also change later in the app’s life.
When Can I Download Delta For iPhone?
At the moment there’s no firm release date for Delta beyond early 2017, but those hoping to play early can sign up for the beta. Testut, the app’s developer, hasn’t confirmed how it will be distributed or what, if any, loopholes it exploits to work on non-jailbroken devices. Here’s hoping the wait isn’t too long.
