Good news, iPad fans – the Delta Nintendo emulator for iOS is coming to iPadOS soon

Big screen retro fun

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It looks like the Delta Nintendo emulator for iOS has been a hit since it launchedearlier this month, racking up tens of thousands of (very positive reviews) on the App Store, and we’re assuming a lot more downloads. Now the developer has confirmed that an iPad version is imminent.

Posting onThreads(via9to5Mac), Delta developer Riley Testut says that Delta for iPad is “near completion”, and will be showing up on iOS the next time an update is pushed through – specifically, in version 1.6 of the app.

The developer has even included a preview video of Delta working on an iPad, showing how the extra screen space and multi-window capabilities ofApple’s tablet will be used to present classic Nintendo games and consoles in a variety of ways on screen.

There’s no time frame yet for when Delta for iPadOS will show up, but it shouldn’t be too long now. If you live in the EU and you’re signed up tothe relevant Patreon, you can already download and install the tablet version from the AltStore.

Emulators and Apple

Apple first opened the App Store doors to emulator appsat the start of April, presumably in an attempt to avoid further antitrust pressure from governments in the EU and the US – pressure which hascontinued to growthis year.

It didn’t take longfor the first emulators to appear, though a Nintendo emulator was pulled by its own developer over concerns about possible legal consequences. While emulators are legal, pirating copyrighted software for them (in the form of ROMs) isn’t.

Apple says emulators on iOS must comply with “all applicable laws”, and so far we haven’t seen any of these apps run into trouble in that area. We did see a Game Boy emulator taken down, but that was because it shamelesslyripped off another app.

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Nintendo is usually fairly aggressivewhen it comes to chasing downgame piracy, though it hasn’t intervened here so far. It most often tackles emulator tech and ROM distribution rather than end users, with the issue further complicated by different loopholes in individual countries (like the right to make personal backups of software).

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Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you’ll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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