Monday, May 30, 2011

Emulators disappear from Android Market!





A handful of emulators have been removed from the Android Market. This affects people who use Android devices to play classic games from old gaming consoles such as Atari, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, and Sega. 

Yongzh's emulators have been among some of the most popular and highest rated in the market, but the emulator creator reports that his developer account has been terminated without warning and all his apps have been removed.

The removal of Yongzh's account comes just weeks after the Playstation emulator PSX4droid, the work of a different developer, was also deleted from the market. This was probably because of the release of Sony's Xperia Play.

Yongzh, who lives in China, took down his Genesis emulator last month after receiving a complaint from Sega, but apparently it wasn't enough to placate Google and/or those console makers who may have lodged complaints with Mountain View. While emulators on their own are not necessarily illegal, using the game ROMs that give them actual value apparently is, at least that's what Nintendo's lawyers claim in a company FAQ. Others say that if one owns the game, it is legal to download the corresponding rom.

Anyways, Yongzh says he's now out one of his main sources of income; but he's posted the emulators on an alternate Android App Market called SlideMe, where he has made them available for free so that existing customers don't have to pay again to download apps. N64oid (N64 emulator) alone has already registered more than 23,000 downloads from the site since Sunday.


Source: cnet

3 comments:

  1. Well...at least there is always sideloading.

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  2. Wow that sucks!

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  3. damn it! i love emulators! I hate this as much as the thing i stated in my name!

    ReplyDelete