Dan Dickinson has taken a scalpel to the high school lab frog of iPod games and strewn out the innards for everyone to see. He lists out the various files and the basic structure with some interesting results, but a gloomy outlook on people wanting to mod or homebrew:
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.
-- Dissecting iPod GamesGame 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.
From his description of the files I don't think it's a far cry to assume that these were done in XCode on a Mac. Which means some secret lab in Cupertino probably has the compiler, base files and emulator more than a few people would love to play with.
I mean, I guess I already knew that. Just kinda obsessing here.
So let me get this straight - Microsoft releases a SDK for the 360 while Sony updates their firmware another time and Apple doesn't even acknowledge the existence of a dev kit.
Weird. Must be Wednesday. Never did get the hang of Wednesdays.
tagged: apple, gaming
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