Old-school Apple fans probably remember a time, just before the iPhone became a massive gaming platform in its own right, when Apple released a wide range of games designed for late-model clickwheel iPods. While those clickwheel-controlled titles didn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire, they represent an important historical stepping stone in Apple’s long journey through the game industry.
Today, though, these clickwheel iPod games are on the verge of becoming lost media—impossible to buy or redownload from iTunes and protected on existing devices by incredibly strong Apple DRM. Now, the classic iPod community is engaged in a quest to preserve these games in a way that will let enthusiasts enjoy these titles on real hardware for years to come.
↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica
A nice effort, of course, and I’m glad someone is putting time and energy into preserving these games and making them accessible to a wider audience. As is usual with Apple, these small games were heavily encumbered with DRM, being locked to both the the original iTunes account that bought them, but also to the specific hardware identifier of the iPod they were initially synchronised to using iTunes. A clever way around this DRM exists, and it involves collectors and enthusiasts creating reauthorising their iTunes accounts to the same iTunes installation, and thus adding their respective iPod games to that single iTunes installation. Any other iPods can then be synced to that master account.
The iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project takes this approach to the next level, by setting up a Windows virtual machine with iTunes installed in it, which can then be shared freely around the web for people to the games to their collection. This is a rather remarkably clever method of ensuring these games remain accessible, but obviously does require knowledge of setting up Qemu and USB passthrough.
I personally never owned an iPod – I was a MiniDisc fanatic until my Android phone took over the role of music player – so I also had no clue these games even existed. I assume most of them weren’t exactly great to control with the limited input method of the iPod, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be huge numbers of people who have fond memories of playing these games when they were younger – and thus, they are worth preserving. We can only hope that one day, someone will create a virtual machine that can run the actual iPod operating system, called Pixo OS.
The very first one was a physical mechanical wheel that spun around. The buttons were around the outside edge and of course the middle.
I remember using someone’s once and it was pretty damn slick to use at the time.
Then they moved to the touch-version of the wheel by the 3rd gen.
I still have mine. Tbh, other than the full firewire port making it difficult to charge the dying battery (only lasts an hour now). It’s still fully functional and can do what it’s always did just as well as ever.
gorbie,
To think that it used to be a novelty. Now that everything has moved to cheap touch interfaces replacing tactile ones it’s practically made physical controls obsolete in personal electronics, major appliances,, even cars where there’s an important reason for having tactile controls. Tactile controls are the outliers, if you can find them. Even in expensive products. cost cutting is a higher priority.
Manufacturers have to solve the problem of poor feedback, like a washing machine, dishwasher, cooktop, or microwave blaring out a loud speaker., but I really hate that when others are sleeping. Oh well.
Alfman – totally agree. We own a 2020 Subaru Outback and the touch screen is just awful. Subsequent software updates have made it better, but touch for the sake of touch *BECAUSE TESLA!* needs to be outlawed for the sake of road safety. I appreciate my reliable, boring 2014 Toyota.