Speaker 1: A beautiful thing happened to me this week with my Apple tv. It became my Sega Genesis and I became 10 years old again. Apple recently changed the guidelines for its app stores and now allows retro video game emulators and the first one for Apple TV just landed. It's called Retro Arch and it quickly shot to the top of the free app chart, but it doesn't actually come with any games to play. There's a bit of a learning curve to use it, but [00:00:30] I was motivated to learn and discovered it's actually easy. I'll walk you through how to use it now. This is really one of the most fascinating things to happen to the Apple tv, at least I think so in a long time because you're seeing this powerful streaming machine become a classic game console. We are getting a glimpse of what is possible when the walled Garden of Apple starts to open up as I explain how you can relive the glory of the past on a modern $130 4K streaming box.
Speaker 1: [00:01:00] There is one more thing we need to address. You see, one aspect of TV OS programming is holding the Apple TV back from being a true gaming system, and I hope Apple can change this in the next TV OS update. I'm Bridget Carey, and this is one more thing. I am not someone who has played with Retro Game emulators before, so if you're like me and you're new to this, I hope you give it a spin because you're going to feel like a magic time traveling hacker. My Apple [00:01:30] remote can pull up a second Genesis game that I haven't seen since the nineties, and I'm playing it with a Nintendo Switch controller and I could even use Bluetooth headphones if I wanted. It's madness, but it is intimidating to start because you can't just download the games through the app. It opens up with a popup showing A URL retro arch Ont.
Speaker 1: BOS has a built-in web server, and this is where your files need to go on your home computer. You're going to go to this address to [00:02:00] upload your game rom files. So where does one find the games? There are many ways to obtain a ROM and I shall show you a very legal way by paying for it. No, seriously, you can buy some games from the Steam store. This is exactly what I did when I got started. There's this bundle of Sega Genesis classic games, and if you only want to dip your toe to test the waters, you can just buy a single title for 99 cents. [00:02:30] I win for Toe Jam and Earl. Maybe you're more of a flicky or a golden ax or a Streets of Rage kind of person. Just find your flavor, make a steam account, download the file, and then you're going to want to drop a copy of the game file into the URL directory for Retro arch. The downloads folder worked just dandy for me. Then you're going to go back to your Apple TV and in the retro Arch app, you just click the game you want to open. And what makes Retro Arch nice is that you don't need to mess
Speaker 2: Around knowing where to [00:03:00] get the emulator program to run the file because it's already programmed with emulators that work for more than 70 consoles and different gaming computers. In this case, it automatically suggests that I run it on a Genesis one, so I select it and bam, instant nostalgia. But you will need a game controller. The Apple remote will not work. You don't need to buy a special controller to play games on your Apple tv. You could just use a controller from another game console and pair it with Bluetooth. [00:03:30] I did it with a Nintendo Switch controller. You just hold down the pair button until the lights begin flashing. Then an Apple TV go to settings and then remotes and devices, you find your controller and connect it. You can also connect more than one for two player games. Now, if you are playing Apple arcade games on the Apple tv, you might've been getting by just fine using the Apple TV remote, but if you're using an emulator to play retro video games, the remote will not work.
Speaker 2: You're going to need [00:04:00] to Bluetooth connect a controller. It was a lot of fun to play these classic games from my childhood with my own kids. I was able to give them important lessons of how game over means. You have to start over from the beginning, not being able to save builds character, but it also brings me to a downside in how TV OS was designed and a problem with save files. The latest Apple TV 4K box has 64 gigs of storage or 128 [00:04:30] gigs of storage depending on which model you get, but not all of that goes toward your games and safe files. TBOS does not provide apps with a persistent storage area. An app can only permanently store about half a megabyte, so it's got enough for some basic settings and the rest of the data is treated as temporary. Users of the emulator are using a cache space, so if the operating system needs to reclaim some disc space, it's going to delete [00:05:00] files from the cache.
Speaker 2: That has not happened to me yet, but it means save files can go poof without warning. Apple Insider and a few other outlets wrote about this problem currently being discussed by developers, and it's why we might not be seeing more emulators like Delta being ported to Apple tv. It's even a reason why we might not have Minecraft on Apple TV. As reported by Apple cider, Minecraft did exist on Apple TV at one point in 2016, but [00:05:30] in a chat thread that's on Mastodon, one developer said that this storage issue is why Minecraft was pulled off Apple tv. Now, if you can buy an Apple TV with 128 gigs, one would hope that Apple could come up with a way to fix this in a software update. I just started playing around with Apple TV last week, and I am going all out and I'm using two home pods for my television speakers, so
Speaker 3: It's tied together. Now, I've been a long time [00:06:00] Roku user, so I'm just now testing it out if it's really worth it to go all in on the ultimate Apple TV setup, and I am enjoying some of the smarts of controlling my home lights and music with my voice from my remote, and there are perks like being able to FaceTime with your phone and have it be displayed on the tv, but there are plenty of ways Apple can really level things up because my biggest gripe right now is that the Apple TV interface does not play nice with Netflix. If you press the Siri button on the remote [00:06:30] and ask it to pull up a show, it's going to pull up the show wherever it exists, like Amazon Prime or Max or Disney Plus, but not if the show is on Netflix, for example, right now, the Matrix, it's streaming on Netflix and you would have to manually go into the Netflix app to even find it.
Speaker 3: Otherwise, apple just wants you to pay full price through its own app. Apple just needs to make a deal with Netflix if it cares about making a product that is best for customers. But I will say [00:07:00] it is cool that it opened up Apple TV to retro games, but not so cool that it limits how we use the storage. It's like Apple is so close to making this an ultimate streaming home system if it just played a little nicer with games and Netflix. In the meantime, when I'm not reliving my Genesis days, I guess I'll just poke around some more on Apple Arcade. The only game that I found interesting to try so far was a game I first played on floppy disc in my classroom Macintosh, [00:07:30] because of course I'm such a millennial. We will just have to see where gaming goes next on Apple TV in June at Apple's WWDC event where we could hear about updates to TBOS. Let me know in the comments any tips you have for using retro arch or tips for gaming on Apple TV and what thoughts you have about Apple streaming box and what you want to see in the future. Thanks for watching and I will see you next Friday to talk about one more thing. In the world of Apple.
