Pushing Buttons: The emulator app helping gamers replay classics from their youth – for now

In this week's newsletter: Delta can be used to play games on vintage consoles from the Game Boy to the Snes ... but for how long?

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A new app has been at the top of the charts on Apple's store for a couple of weeks now: Delta. Its app store page is illustrated with shots of very Nintendo-esque on-screen controls, framing screenshots from Game Boy, Snes and Mega Drive games. The reviews are glowing: I've been downloading tons of games I played when I was a kid, it's so nostalgic!" This has saved me so much money." And yet neither Sega nor Nintendo has anything to do with the app, and until recently, software of this type was banned from Apple's platforms. How can this be?

Delta is an emulator: that is, a piece of software that can successfully mimic a games console, and can run code designed for that games console (ie, games). Delta can run ROMs (digital copies, basically) of games for all the different iterations of the Game Boy, the Nintendo DS, the Nes, Snes and the Sega Mega Drive. This is not illegal. However, downloading those copies of games themselves is illegal. This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine Delta like a Kindle: it imitates a book, and you can read books on it, but only if you have the PDFs.