QJ.NET How-to #10: ZodTTD and the world of homebrew emulators on iPhone and Touch

Part How-to and part QuickGuide, this feature will get you moving and introduce you to the world of homebrew emulators for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Today, we’re going to take some time to look into one of the homebrew scene’s valued coders to date, as well as compile for you the varied line of homebrew emulators that can be run on the iPhone OS.

Other than the iPhone Dev-Team, one of the more popular homebrew developers in the iPhone and iPod Touch community is ZodTTD. While the Dev-Team is more focused on the actual jailbreak hacking, it’s ZodTTD who makes some astounding brew to run on a jailbroken handheld. And it’s not just any kind of ‘brew, if I might add: this guy works with emulators. Tons of them!

Today, we’re going to take some time to look into one of the homebrew scene’s valued coders to date. And mind you, he’s not just swimming in iPhone coding circles. He works on other platforms too, as you’ll soon discover.

Part How-to and part QuickGuide, this feature will get you moving and introduce you to the world of homebrew emulators for your iPhone or iPod Touch!

Early beginnings: the name, the man, the project

So who’s ZodTTD anyway? His hacking alias was actually taken from one of his earliest projects – the ZodTTD engine he made for the Tapwave Zodiac handheld device. This “Zodiac TTD” project of his was actually a port of OpenTTD – the engine used for Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

That’s where everything starts… until, of course, he chanced on the PCSX source code. Story goes that, one night, he was pretty bored with tweaking his ZodTTD engine. And out of boredom, we get a spark of light. With the PlayStation emulator’s source code, he burned the midnight oil, programming way up until morning.

The next day, he released a working PSX emulator for the Zodiac. This would have been circa 2005. The rest, as they say, is history. (Guess what I found over at our forums, too?)

Visit: QJ.NET PSP homebrew discussion

Now ZodTTD has had quite a huge arsenal of homebrew projects to his name – mostly ports, but who said reinventing the wheel is bad? Let’s start with two of his oldest and still very much alive emulators: the gpSP emulator and psx4all.

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ZodTTD’s gpSP project began after the Zodiac era when he had moved on to programming for the GP2X platform. At that time, Exophase’s gpSP Gamboy Advance emulator was making waves on the PSP. ZodTTD got permission to port this over to the GP2X handheld device, and from then on kept the gpSP project alive as his anchor and proverbial bread and butter.

With so many releases for gpSP under his belt, ZodTTD then moved into the iPhone community where he finally ported over his GBA emulator. With the switch of platforms from GP2X to iPhone, we now call gpSP as gpSPhone.

This, as you may know, caused quite a stir and remains to be continuously updated even up to today.

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There’s also the psx4all project, which also had its roots in the Tapwave Zodiac era (see previous section above). After setting a footprint on the Zodiac, it went over to GP2X development. The PlayStation emulator sort of hit an obstacle at this stage, but ZodTTD eventually got help from other developers.

As with his gpSP emulator, psx4all got likewise treatment: ZodTTD brought it over to the iPhone OS, causing yet another round of jawdrops in the community. With the platform jump, psx4all now became psx4iphone. Come December 2007, the first official version was released to the public.

Here’s an early demo video of its very, very first release:

But that’s not the end of the line. With gpSPhone and psx4all underway, ZodTTD also made a promise to deliver all sorts of emulator projects to the iPhone. Among them:

• SNES emulator: snes4iphone (initial release here)
• Sega Genesis emulator: genesis4iphone (beta vids here)
• GameBoy emulator: gameboy4iphone (beta release here)
• TurboGrafx-16 emulator: temper4iphone (video here)
• MAME arcade emulator: mame4iphone (early release here)

Now, ZodTTD is not only known for his emulators. See, along the way, he’s had quite a few other popular projects besides, mostly ports of games and applications from other platforms, some of which were also older projects of his from the Zodiac or GP2X era.

• OpenTTD engine: OpenTTD (first public release here)
• VLC player application: vlc4iphone (first public release here)
• Quake port: quake4iphone (initial release here)
• Doom port: Doom (v1.1.0 here)

More recent versions are available through Cydia’s installer.

Aside from that, ZodTTD is well known in Apple circles for also establishing an identity on the App Store where he release a Falling Sands game and is very much active in trying to get am iPhone control pad attachment of sorts available for the mass market.

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