Emulators on iOS usually get shut down as soon as Apple’s App Store review team catches wind of their existence – usually thanks to news and blog coverage. (Sorry.) But guess who’s on holiday break right now? Yep. That’s why a new app called Floppy Cloud, which is secretly an NES and Super Nintendo emulator is still available for sale on the iTunes App Store as of this morning. Get it while the getting’s good, as they say. Because this app is sure to soon disappear.
Sneaking an emulator onto the App Store has become something of a holiday tradition, Touch Arcade, which was first to spot Floppy Cloud’s little secret, points out. Developers know that the app review team takes a holiday break, which means iTunes Connect gets shut down. Anyone wanting to release new apps or updates had to have them in by December 18th, or they were just out of luck. But that also makes it a good time to try to get away with a little something too.
Floppy Cloud is one of many emulators that has found its way onto iOS devices. To name a few: Nescaline only lasted for hours. iMAME was live for a couple of days a couple of years ago, and Awesome Baby Names, which was really a secret Game Boy Advance emulator, was quickly killed off in 2013 as was MyStache, which offered emulators for NES, SNES and Game Boy, and SNES emulator Remote File Manager.
The new app Floppy Cloud claims to offer a way “to connect to remove [sic] services such as Dropbox or an FTP server and preview your files as well as downloading them locally,” according to its grammatically unsound App Store description.
But the app also lets you “manage” .nes (NES ROM) files or .smc (Super Nintendo ROM) files by loading them up in the app in the appropriate emulator directly in the app itself. To use the app, you’ll load the file into your Dropbox folder, then select the file you want play. (Redmond Pie has more detailed instructions and screenshots.) The app also supports iCade and MFi controllers, Touch Arcade says, which is great since the games emulators run weren’t originally designed for touchscreen devices.
The emulators don’t include native support for iPhone 6/6 Plus, but the app is universal.
Floppy Cloud is $1.99 on iTunes for however long it lasts.
Image credits: Touch Arcade