I'm playing Pokemon HeartGold on my iPhone and I love it!
I installed Ignited via SideStore. No Jailbreaking necessary. Not computer tether. SideStore can renew the side loaded emulator every 7 days when on WiFi. The iPhone is perfect for DS emulation with a stylus.
(Ignited is a fork of Delta with more options, and SideStore is a fork of AltStore, with no computer tether needed)
I play on my Android phone and I honestly love being able to just install the APK once, or even just install the emulator from like the Play store.
Pokemon is like the perfect game to play on phones though, HG/SS is my fav Pokemon game in the series and it has a bunch of cool custom ROM versions too. Pokemon games just play so well on phones.
The DS Zelda are also amazing. They don’t require any buttons to be played (except for L trigger to activate your tool faster) I created a full screen skin with no buttons just dual screens. Save load and home buttons at the bottom and it plays wonderfully.
I just hate how you can't easily trade from game to game to actually "collect em' all"
The emulators I've tried made it very difficult
try romhacks!
Sounds like you need PokeMMO.
I wish there was an updated homebrew app similar to pokemon bank. Or maybe something for retroachievements. What if retroachievements had a .jpeg cloud save that kept track of progress?
trading available through this?
What's the best android emulator out there atm?
DraStic is currently the best but MelonDS is very good too.
Can you do that on Android?
Yes. It’s even easier on Android. Look for RetroArch. It emulates a bunch of consoles.
Best Android app for emulating DS in my experience is DraStic.
Can confirm. I played so many games on DRaStic over the last few years. Zero issues.
Of course, some games are not well suited to a full touch screen, especially if they require quick coordination of both stylus and D-Pad. They are relatively few though - most games work great.
Only since like ten years ago.
Nah. Closer to 15 years since emulation was possible on Android.
I play Pokemon via PokeMMo and I urge you to check it out! It's available for desktop, mac, Android and iOS. You just need the roms of the games you want to play and then you create your character and choose your starting region.
Can you explain more what it is? Unfortunately, I’m already using all 3 free apps so I can’t add it for now.
Sure! It's an app/game you download which uses the Roms of the different games to enable you to play Pokemon online with other players, but you don't have to engage with them. You can also choose to just play each game as if you were offline and then transition into a new region after the top four, while having access to your pokemon from the old region. It's a lot of fun, but the devs rebalanced the games a bit, which makes it a bit harder, but still fair :) Here's the link where you can find more information: https://pokemmo.com/en/
TL:DC
Paid or you have to use a PC
Holy fuck this gave me a nostalgia hit as strong as a freight train
HeartGold is retro? Fuck Im old
DS is retro.
inb4 3DS is retro.
A word of caution
These types of things are prime targets for malware and zero days have been on the rise for iPhones - I would highly suggest you carefully consider whether or not this would be worth compromising your phones security over.
There are lots and lots of ways to run emulators and roms these days, including buying a handheld game kit from canakit or something similiar, I’m sure, to run retropie which could emulate any number of retro systems with negligible risk to you, your device, your accounts or your private data. Just some food for thought.
The code is open source for both Ignited and SideStore. You can check it on GitHub for SideStore and Ignited. The chance of malware in open source is much lower since you can decide to compile your own if you like.
You can also speak with the active devs on their Discord. There is much less chance of malware than by using Temu or TikTok…
While the likelihood is lesser, and open source technologies are helpful for finding bugs, they are not a guarantee and their degree of effectiveness is questionable. Especially with the rate at which AI continues to improve, making the likelihood that an AI could detect a vuln in the code and relay that info to a hacker much higher than before.
I’m a professional in this field, and have first hand experience with the matter. I understand you’d like to defend your post and the product but this is quite misleading.
I’m not saying this is a virus, but it increases the chances that you could get hacked, and you should consider if playing Pokémon on your phone is worth that risk. That is all.
This remake is awesome, I finished like two months ago in original hardware... going to Kanto is pretty cool.
So far I like the gameplay and use of the touchscreen. I had tried black version and didn’t like it as much somehow. This one has the feel of the original, same grid design same map. But wit 3D graphics on top (kinda like the Zelda remake for Switch)
that's a really beautiful emulated skin, I wish ignited worked on android lol
The emulation itself is melonDS packaged into an iOS app. It also does GameBoy, GBA, NES, SNES, and N64 (which works astonishingly well, going through PaperMario64 too)
can melonDS actually look like that on android? I'll have to go check it out asap
As for stylus, I’m using this. It’s a capacitive stylus (works on iPhone, unlike apple’s pencil) but it’s battery powered to keep a thin point and high precision vs the rubbery knob stylus.
That’s awesome. Does it perform well? Last time I tried heart gold emulation it was so laggy and I couldn’t fix it and gave up. This looks really cool tho in tempted to try
I’m on iPhone 14 Pro and it works flawlessly! Even has fast forward (I think 125% without JIT). The emulator even has microphone and lid closing functions for the games that use it.
Edit: it was also working on my iPhone X with no issues.
Never heard of the sidestore, but it seems so cool! This gets me closer to switching to iPhones than any of Apple's events do. If the sidestore has a real file manager and local music player, and possibly even Firefox+uBlock origin, I would seriously consider switching to iPhone.
iOS has a native file manager app that works quite well. SideStore is great. The one caveat is that it’s limited to sideloading 3 apps if you don’t pay for an Apple developer account $99/year I think. Also EU has passed a law forcing Apple to open his store but nothing has happened yet. We’re all crossing fingers.
If the EU does that and Apple follows through in America (doubtful), Apple will most likely have my money. I'd love to have the good parts of iPhones but I can't stand how locked down it currently is.
The native file manager kinda sucks. It's clunky and doesn't have many features. On the other hand, FX on Android is super fast and feature rich. So much better than the stock Android file manager.
About Firefox, all browsers on iOS have to use Safari engine so they are basically just a Safari skin so I don't know if you can use uBO but probably not.
It's nice, but why would it tempt you to Apple? The same thing is available on android with much less work. F-Droid is a FOSS app catalogue, and you can just download it off the play store. You can also just use Firefox and play local music with nothing getting in the way.
Because there actually are some desirable features only on iPhones. iMessage is the big one, but also many app developers--and college students around me!!!--treat Android users as 2nd class citizens; also I want to degoogle myself a bit. I'm also afraid of the direction Android is going in right now.
However, iPhones currently have so many undesirable "features" that I'll never switch at the moment. The big ones are no sideloading, crappy file manager, no Firefox+uBlock origin, and no local music player. And the 2000% storage markups on iPhones are atrocious.
I'm using Delta myself, any reason why you chose Ignited over it? Might consider switching
It has some nice qol functions. My favorite is auto saving your state when you quit a game and re loads it when you come back. There are also more options for skins and other settings. Also my sync from google drive on delta loaded everything onto ignited seamlessly (note quick saves were not imported)
it's been a few years since I've used an iPhone, mainly because of the third party apps thing. Don't these usually get shut down for violating Apple's enterprise license agreement or something?
This uses the legal 3 testing app you can load via Xcode which is an Apple app. SideStore simply facilitates that process.
Been using Delta via AltStore for a couple years now, never heard of these options! You consider these better than those?
I switched from Delta/AltStore about 2 weeks ago. Ignited and SideStore are based on them but unlock more options. The no need to pair with your computer every 7 days has been amazing. Join their Discord for more info.
I’m just at the beginning but I love the fresh gameplay and look and still get memories of Pokemon gold. I also recommend the Zelda on DS (Phantom Hourglass was awesome!!!)
I'd rather play it on the 3DS, but it's cool that you enjoy it your way :)
If I had a 3DS. Also I have my phone with me at all time.