Posted in r/Piracy by u/OlsroFR • 30 points and 4 comments
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The original was posted on /r/piracy by /u/OlsroFR on 2024-11-02 10:16:52+00:00.

Hey,

Have you ever heard about iPod Clickwheel Games ? Those games were in sale on the iTunes Store starting 2006 then Apple delisted everything in 2011. The only way until very recently to play those titles was to use the 20/56 partial cracked games archive that were properly decrypted in 2006 and only the iPod Video is able to run a Custom Firmware to accept those unsigned binaries to run, which excludes Nanos and Classics.

Even legitimate purchases can be screwed in this affair if they lose the game files or their Apple ID because Apple did not offer any kind of redownloads for this content (compared to iOS apps which can be redownloaded if necessary). And since those games can be almost 20 years old at this point, many legitimate purchasers lost their iPod, or access to their mail address, or use a different PC that the one they’ve used 20 years ago.

I built a virtual machine that act as an infinite offline distribution center of authed games so everyone can transfer again the games to any kind of Clickwheel iPod (including Nanos and Classics !). 44/56 games (80%) are now preserved for everyone. There’s a lot of goated games that deserved preservation, like Phase by Harmonix Studio (which is an official clone of Guitar Hero) or Peggle by PopCap Games (did you know that this game cured depression ? ).

The Virtual Machine tricks iTunes that it is running always in the same PC, which keeps the games always authed even if the Virtual Machine is running on a completely different host environment ;)

Also, since that DRM was designed 20 years ago, it was designed without permanent Internet connectivity in mind which means that it does not need to phone home to send the games to any new iPod. I take advantage of this by distributing the Virtual Machine as fully disconnected from the Internet since it is not needed to have any kind of Internet connectivity for the distribution to happen.

Everything is available freely on GitHub for everyone:

Feel free to star + follow the project.

Apple also did not want their clients to play games on a single device coming from more than 5 Apple IDs, but the community found a bypass that I documented to play all games anyway on same device even if games are coming from much more distinct accounts than 5.

Also, if you still own the games files (or an iPod who still has the games you’ve bought back in the day), you can help at preserving the missing ones on the virtual machine with me so future generations will be able to enjoy those hidded gems forever.

Here’s the list of missing games:

  • Bubble Bash

  • Cake Mania 3

  • Chess & Backgammon Classics

  • Lode Runner

  • Naval Battle

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Aegir’s Fire

  • Real Soccer 2009

  • Star Trigon

  • Sudoku v1.1

  • Tamagotchi 'Round the World

  • Tiger Woods PGA TOUR

  • Trivial Pursuit

  • Wonder Blocks

Thank you for your attention and happy iPod (retro)gaming ! :)

ArsTechnica made an article about this project: