Gaming on the iPod barely predates the iPhone’s arrival in 2007, but fans have launched a project to be sure they can still play the games into the future.
The first Apple mobile gaming device: the click-wheel iPod.
The first Apple mobile gaming device: the click-wheel iPod.
An iPod fan going by the name Quix discovered a small loophole Apple’s digital rights management protection (DRM) for iPod games: they could back up their iPod games manually on a second copy of iTunes on a different machine. They then used this method to back up their own 19 iPod clickwheel games.
In discussions about his discovery with a user in France going by Olsro in a iPod fan group on Discord, the pair started the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project. Olsro created a “communitarian virtual machine that anyone can use to sync auth[orized] clickwheel games into their iPod” using the Qemu emulator.