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.