Be Excellent To Each Other

Mother's allowed me to use the 32gb iPod Touch 2G she bought a while back since she hardly gets the time to use all its features (only listen to music on occasion).

I am sorely tempted to undergo some 'hawt' Mega Drive/Mega CD and PC Engine emulation action on the thing so wish to undergo the process known as "jailbreaking" - or "unlocking" - the device to allow things like Cydia to be installed.

I am trying to google for the most convenient and fool-proof solution around but my brain is already starting to hurt from seeing words like "tethered", "untethered", "DFU", "redsn0w", "blackra1n" and what not tossed around. Seeing as this is a fairly recent generation with close-to-the-top-range capacity and therefore pretty expensive, I naturally do not wish to do a single thing wrong and risk buggering the poor thing up beyond full, reset-button recovery (and hopefully without losing all the music on it). From examining the general settings the iTouch appears to be on firmware 2.2.1, and I'm not all that fussed about upgrading it for now.

So, in short, has anyone here any experience over unlocking these things? And aware of what the least complicated, least-likely-to-fuck-things-up tutorial is?

Not a touch, but an iPhone 2G. I proper bricked it.

It would only load what looked like a DOS screen, with the same error message repeating about how it had nothing to boot from.

When you jailbreak them, you put something into some temporary memory for it to boot off, and I managed to wipe that as well, so couldn't boot it up.

Good news though (and the reason for this post); even if you properly knacker it up, you just plug it back into iTunes and tell it to restore it to factory settings to fix it.

Interesting. Though I'm preferably one to try and avoid using iTunes for anything whatsoever (SharePod et al can transfer music and videos, you can access the app store directly via the device, etc). If only Apple didn't bloat it to hell and back and make it the core centre of all necessary functions for most people...

Similarly, it would appear Sony expects you to install MediaGo to do PSN transfers or whatever, even though that thing installs about a million unecessary things without even asking for your permission. What is it with corporations and their stubborn belief that we *need* their crap to do basic stuff?

Well, I got round to jailbreaking my iPod Touch last weekend, and proceeded to try many of the nifty Cydia offerings available.


What a crushing disappointment. And I mean, crushing.

I don't know if there's any access to hardware rendering on this device, but my goodness it would most certainly help improve practically all the emulators I've tried (the ones that worked, at least). I don't know what this ZodTTD chap did to achieve the remarkable feat of making a 533Mhz-powered Apple playing machine emulate a Mega Drive slower than the 100Mhz-powered Nintendo DS, but he sure has quite the 'talent'. I experienced similar issues with his NES emulator (as well as another NES emu by somebody else), his Gameboy emulator, his MAME emulator (which kept going back to the springboard everytime I quit out of a game, though whether this is an established MAME trait or not I'm not sure), his TurboGrafx-16 emulator (another department where the DS pisses on top of Jobs and co), and his SNES emulator. Would've judged his PSX and GBA emulators also, but hark! They kept taking me back to the springboard after less than a second of an attempt at loading a game, and kept freezing the whole system (thus necessitating a cold reboot) after less than a second of an attempt at loading a game, respectively. Furthermore, said Mega Drive emulator would keep opening up Safari to display a Google ad everytime I started it up, until I switched my Wi-Fi off.

The most common problem with everything I've played, however, has to be the piss-poor compatibility between touch-sensitive controls and people with not-Japanese-enough hands. My thumb can practically cover the entirety of many of the virtual d-pads I've seen implemented (mostly in portrait mode). Generally, I've discovered that without that feeling of physical pressure against a button or d-pad I can't grapple with precision as well as I'd like to, and much of the time many of the screen controls in emus, ports, interpreters and the like don't even work when you want them to, requiring repeated pressing of the general area until you get the desired response. Even ScummVM - usually something you can rely upon - is practically unplayable on the blasted thing, particularly at the frontend which curiously expects you to manually guide a pointer (which isn't even calibrated properly with your thumb position) and do some bizarre tap-dancing combination to trigger a command or whatever (I couldn't work it out anyway, and I resorted to using the virtual keyboard to tell it to click this and click that) - compared to the DS version where you could just point at something and it would trigger your command there and then. Now I know I need one of those gamepad-control addons now - hasn't anyone got round to finishing and flogging such a contraption yet? It's been three years now.

Mind you, I doubt the official, Apple-sanctioned stuff will be suitable for me either. Had a quick go on Tyrian and quickly discovered how easy it is to perform worse at it than usual when a massive thumb like mine obscures too much of the playing area for my liking and makes navigating the ship that much more difficult (and what's with the permanent autofire???).


Not sure if all of my problems are related to the firmware (I'm using 2.2.1 if that's of any importance) - though I'm willing to bet it'll be more of a hardware problem (from what I've learnt the latest generations iPhones and Touches have more power/ram to them). In addition, from what I've read, there's seemingly no way to overclock an iPhone/Touch atm.


I'm just cursed with ghastly, unsuitable thumbs aren't I? Hard to believe I hyped myself up so much for this whole trying-a-new-gaming-platform thing, hoping to understand exactly what everyone else was raving about, and the whole experience has just left me freaking *depressed*. Major. Letdown.

Roll on the GP2X Wiz* (or - to go further - the Pandora).



*Mind you, I'll laugh uproariously if it turns out a GP32 can emulate the MD better.

I'm going to assume I'm totally alone on this one, right?