Luckily, the systems I was really wanting to play on my iPad have pretty decent emulators. This is the part I thought would be the wonkiest, and in some ways it is. If you’re doing this on your phone, you’ll probably want to check out some tethering apps. Here’s a great post on Reddit with a huge list of Cydia apps to check out. The jailbrake/poweruser crowd have a lot of utilities that sound pretty cool. Side Note: It’s worth checking out the non-emulator apps you can get on Cydia. Cydia is not very pretty, it’s slow as hell, and lacks Apple’s design polish, but I guess that’s just the designer in me complaining. The biggest drawback to the whole Cydia/jailbreaking scene for me is the ugliness of it all. From there you can browse through all kinds of apps (some free and some paid) that will let you do everything from tweak settings, set up new gestures and button shortcuts, tether your connection, and of course, play games. If you’re new to jailbreaking, Cydia is kind of the defacto unofficial app store, and it will be installed automagically. Once you’re done jailbreaking your device, there are just a couple more steps. You should probably back up your phone/tablet before you start using evasi0n just to be safe, which I conveniently forget to do. It’s pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it process, but you do have to launch a jailbreak app in the middle of it all. At least you get a pretty progress bar that lets you know what’s going on. This part of the process is filled with lots of magic and computer wizardry that I don’t understand at all, so try not to think about what’s going on behind the scenes when you’re jailbreaking your device. Basically, if you’ve got an iOS device running 6.0 or 6.1, all you have to do is download the app to your computer, plug the device in via USB, and get it started. The tool the tech world has been talking about this week is called evasi0n, and it’s pretty simple. Jailbreaking tools have come a long way since I did it three years ago or so. Getting Started: Jailbreaking With Evasi0n Just remember, if you’re doing this to your phone, as of a few days ago it’s kind of illegal, but whatever. Hopefully by sharing my resources and explaining what I did I can help you out in case you’re even lazier than me, and perhaps feel like I’m contributing a little Karma to the web in some tiny way. So, I did some quick research, found plenty of other people who had figured out the hard stuff already, and now I have a jailbroken iPad Mini loaded with ROMs that I can pair with a Wiimote. But now I have a second iOS device that isn’t a phone and when I started thinking about playing Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and NES games on it, I got a little giddy. I don’t much like the idea of messing with my phone when it’s the device that I need to be able to use to call 911 and order pizzas and such. Until I realized I could play retro games on my new iPad Mini, that is. I toyed around with Jailbreaking a few years ago when I had an old-school iPhone 3G, but since then iOS has improved so much I haven’t felt the need. When news broke about iOS 6 being jailbroken yesterday, I didn’t pay much attention to the headlines. If you’re wondering what kind of car to get, which dog breed would be best for your tiny apartment, or what the worst Land Before Time Movie is (actual search query that led someone here), chances are at least a bzillion people have wrote about their experiences online. If there’s one thing the Internet is great for, it’s benefiting from other people’s hard work.
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