Just a few days after Apple finally opened the App Store to iPhone retro game emulation for the first time, the Delta emulator has taken the world by storm. The free app is able to play countless classic Nintendo games from a variety of consoles, and quickly shot to the top of the App Store’s charts, where it remains as of Friday afternoon. Currently, Delta is the only emulator on the App Store worth downloading, but that might change in the near future.
On Friday, iMore reported that the developers who built the multi-emulator frontend Provenance are now looking to bring their app to the App Store as well.
Joseph Mattiello, project lead of Provenance, told iMore that he and his team “are working on a release” but that there is some work to be done. “I need to investigate these new rules before an App Store submission, and to improve some quality-of-life issues,” he explained. “Also, I need to change some things to adhere to the App Store’s rules, such as mentioning beta.”
Mattiello wasn’t ready to commit to a release date, so we might be waiting a while.
Provenance has similarities to Riley Testut’s Delta, but notably supports a much wider variety of consoles. Here’s a quick comparison between the two:
- Delta: NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS
- Provenance: Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx; Bandai WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color; PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, PC Engine Super CD-ROM² System / TurboGrafx-CD, PC Engine SuperGrafx, PC-FX; NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Boy, Pokémon mini; Sega SG-1000, Master System, Mega Drive / Genesis, Game Gear, Mega-CD / CD, 32X, Saturn; SNK Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color; Sony PlayStation
Delta’s App Store listing notes that support for even more systems is coming, but as you can tell, there’s really no comparing the two at the moment. Plus, the Provenance team says that support for Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 games is in the works as well.