iPod Games Homebrew Practically Impossible

September 14th, 2006, 23:23 Posted By: wraggster

Apple's recent annoucement of iPod games has visions of Doom and sugarplums dancing in our heads. I mean, we know you can already technically do Doom on the iPod. But we're looking for a solution that doesn't require us to install some godawful Linux OS.

Unfortunately, it looks like the iPod's game SDK is extremely closed... homebrew at this point looks like a virtual impossibility on a stock iPod:

Modifying the games is difficult at best, if not impossible, because of the checksumming of every file in the bundle, and then the certificate against the manifest.
Game resource files, particularly audio, aren't obfuscated and can be extracted successfully.

Homebrew is probably an impossibility at this point because of the expectation of a signed cert from Apple.

The fact that there are platform identifiers in the plists makes me wonder what Apple's future plans entail. Maybe this would just be for later iPod revisions, or maybe they're just looking forward. Still, quite interesting.

Cathode Tan, where we snagged this from, points out how absurd it is that while Microsoft releases an SDK for the 360 and Sony updates their PSP firmware, Apple won't even acknowledge the homebrew community one way or another. Then again, Apple has never made any attempt to capture gamers — that's why every Apple Intel Mac owner has Boot Camp installed.

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