[HN Gopher] Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QE...
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Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)
Author : zdw
Score : 211 points
Date : 2022-12-22 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devos50.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (devos50.github.io)
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 2008. we were gifted an iphone 2G 32gig model somehow.
|
| the shock/surprise/awe on my face is something i remember. by
| that point, i was a regular internet user who "had" heard about
| apple and iphones on tech websites and stuff (youtube was not
| even on radar, remember EDGE?)
|
| so it was text for the most part on nokia N series phones.
| getting an iphone in hand felt like leaving a horse carriage and
| strapping on to a saturn V. fun times
| zekica wrote:
| I had the opposite experience in 2007, Nokia N series for me
| was miles better than iPhone OS 1.0 - it did a lot more than
| iPhone: - GPS navigation in the background - Chat applications
| - IRC, XMPP in the background - Photos and videos better than
| compact cameras - HSDPA 3G (3.6Mbps) - Sharing 3G via WiFi -
| tethering - Device to device file sharing - Real 3D games using
| OpenGL ES 1 - TV Out
|
| The (really important) things that iPhone had were: - bigger
| screen, - capacitive multitouch, - better GPU acceleration - a
| lot better input latency
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| >bigger screen, - capacitive multitouch, - better GPU
| acceleration - a lot better input latency
|
| Yep. All Nokia fanbois (sic) omit what S-series were - a
| lagging, slow in the UI, cumbersome.
|
| 5800, which was a 'response' to iPhone was just a facelift
| with all the problems still there.
|
| It's an impprtant lesson on how a better _UX_ won with
| overall lessen capabilities (should I remind about MMS?
| Should I remind what it was effectivly killed by iMessage
| integration?)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Great to see progress on this front.
|
| Hopefully, eventually it'll be possible to emulate all the way up
| to iOS 6, which would be incredible from a software preservation
| perspective.
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| I have tens of gigabytes of my own archived IPAs waiting for
| this to happen. That era of apps was so charming and uncynical.
| janjones wrote:
| I was working on emulating apps directly [1] by translating API
| calls from iOS to Windows APIs using WinObjC [2]. Unfortunately,
| WinObjC got abandoned and didn't even contain as many APIs as I
| thought, so the result cannot emulate complex apps. But it was
| fun - lots of low-level stuff, patching 3rd-party code, etc.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ipasimulator/ipasim
|
| [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC
| zbowling wrote:
| I wish we could open source everything we did at Apportable 7
| years ago. Bits of it are up on github including our version of
| Foundation.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Wow, incredible stuff. There's a real love to the craft that
| shines through with projects like this. I can only imagine the
| eureka moment of seeing Springboard launch for the first time.
|
| Martijn's clearly more than capable of landing a highly
| comfortable industry job, but something drew him to Delft
| instead. The field benefits hugely from people like him, big
| respect.
| devos50 wrote:
| Author here - thanks for the kind words! Both the moments I
| first saw the Apple logo rendered correctly (rendered by the
| bootloader) and the first time the Home Screen loaded were epic
| milestones indeed!
|
| I treated this mostly as a side project but reverse engineering
| has always been a huge passion of me. However, I managed to
| combine some aspects of reverse engineering into my research
| work I've done in Delft, most notably by reverse engineering
| mobile banking APIs
| (https://devos50.github.io/assets/pdf/iom.pdf) and by
| deobfuscating strings in obfuscated Android APKs
| (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf).
| israrkhan wrote:
| Great stuff. I can already see few use cases for this. However, I
| think having more technical details about how to go about
| reversing and implementing new hardware components for QEMU will
| be great. The destination may not be interesting to many, but the
| path definitely is.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is some incredible work, and my personal hope is that it
| paves the way for proper archival of apps and games from the
| early iOS era. Early iPhone games in particular are at risk of
| becoming lost works as sometimes even era-appropriate hardware
| renders them unplayable due to OS updates.
| garganzol wrote:
| iOS user interface was very cool back then - so simple and
| intuitive. It kind of reminds me the Windows 95 at its heyday.
| The same feeling of power and simplicity, a pure joy to use.
| mattl wrote:
| Windows 95 felt inspired by NeXTSTEP, so there's a common
| lineage.
| garganzol wrote:
| As they say: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Great artists steal from... other great artists? :)
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Maybe we are just looking at things through nostalgia goggles?
|
| Maybe current generation kids would hate Windows 95 and iOS 1.
| robotnikman wrote:
| The skeuomorphic design of early iOS is certainly nostalgic.
| jonas-w wrote:
| A week ago i first saw this word "skeuomorphism" used on HN and
| now i'm seeing it nearly everyday in the comments on HN. Is
| this Frequency Illusion [0] or does the word get used very
| often now?
|
| [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| officeplant wrote:
| I think it popped back up a lot this year with apple finally
| changing the settings menu in MacOS from the layout that went
| unchanged for a long time other than face lifts occasionally.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Probably frequency illusion. Looking at google trends, it
| peaked around the release of iOS 7, when Apple introduced a
| flat design.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s.
| ..
| fredoralive wrote:
| You clearly weren't around 10 years ago, where the discourse
| was all about APPLE'S SKEUOMORPHISM IS SATAN and FLAT
| MATERIAL DESIGN IS THE ONE TRUE WAY all the time.
|
| Alas[1], flat won, so people probably talk about it less.
|
| [1] I know its a lot easier to fuck up skeuomorphic stuff,
| but now everything's boring shit...
| wolpoli wrote:
| It's amazing looking at the staying power of flat design.
| 10 years ago, some commentators on HN were calling flat
| design a fad. 10 years later, we only evolved to flat 2.0
| with saturated hue on buttons and bit of shadow around
| buttons. Oh we got some cute superfluous animations.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| [dead]
| rvense wrote:
| I feel the same way. I'm so bored with this stupid
| Helvetica-kitsch.
| fredoralive wrote:
| I may not be the greatest fan of flat design, but how
| dare you besmirch the good name of Helvetica.
|
| The fact that every company feels the need to commission
| their own vanity font, which will inevitably be a generic
| soft humanist sans serif that is indistinguishable from
| any other company's generic soft humanist sans serif
| vanity font, now that is the true scourge.
|
| :-)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I don't have anything to back it up, but I think "flat is
| easy" has a _lot_ to do with how strongly it was advocated
| for and popularized back then. Skeuomorphism takes a great
| deal of skill to craft -- technical skill in e.g.
| Photoshop, artistic skill to make it tasteful, and UX skill
| to make it usable. In contrast, anybody with even a passing
| understanding of HTML and CSS and can draw monochrome
| squares all day long, and the need for graphics software is
| minimized or in some cases removed entirely.
|
| In a world where time to ship is everything (as it was at
| that point), flat was a natural choice for projects driven
| by technical types. Way faster and cheaper to slap Material
| Design on it and shove it out the door than it is to hire a
| designer to come up with a unique, eye-catching
| skeuomorphic design that set your product apart.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| This could not be further from the truth. Steve Jobs and
| Scott Forstall were the ones pushing for the realistic
| icons (not "skeuomorphism" btw, Scott is on record saying
| he hates the word "skeuomorphism"). It was a cabal within
| Apple, lead by Jony Ive, that was pushing for flat. When
| Steve Jobs died in 2011, and Tim Cook fired Scott
| Forstall in 2012, that cabal all of a sudden had way more
| leverage. And so, in 2013, iOS 7 was released with the
| flat design. It's as simple as that.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| For iOS/macOS specifically, yes, but the comment chain
| seemed (to me at least) to be discussing the trend
| towards flatness in the wider industry, which had been in
| motion well before Apple got on board.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| That's not true either. The only notable example you can
| come up with is Google Chrome. And let's not sit here and
| pretend that Google was what all the designers were
| copying. Google's design has always been that terrible
| flat stuff. Google Chrome's icon, for some reason, used
| the "realistic" design for only 2 years before changing
| it to match the rest of the company's icons.
|
| The "wider industry" was copying Apple. Tons of icons
| changed from "realistic" to "flat" in 2013, which was a
| direct reaction to iOS 7.
| fredoralive wrote:
| You're forgetting stuff like Metro, introduced with
| Windows Phone 7 in 2010 (then infamously Windows 8), and
| Android was getting flatter from around 4.x in 2011. The
| trend was definitely moving towards flat UI, and people
| really were criticising Apple for not following it. Apple
| wasn't really a leader in this stuff, certainly not on an
| OS level.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Another bad take. Not even gonna bother saying why, this
| is exhausting.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Weirdly enough, complicated graphics were all the rage
| when they were a massive resource drain and pushing the
| limits of the hardware at the time.
|
| The _second_ they became cheap enough to be actually
| feasible, they fell out of favor and were replaced by
| bland, amateurish design that could run fine on 90s
| hardware.
|
| I guess they found other ways to make software bloated
| and slow and didn't need the UI for that anymore.
| endgame wrote:
| And yet: modern apps are so badly written that the
| computer struggles to render monochrome rectangles, while
| 90s hardware rendered buttons with bevels, obvious cues
| to interactivity, and shortcuts that were actually
| discoverable.
| kennend3 wrote:
| Frequency illusion.
|
| Same like when you buy a new car and suddenly notice a lot of
| people have them.
|
| It is often used in the context of Apple, you just never
| noticed and now you are.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Not advertising, but apple did have beef with
| https://www.corellium.com/ -they tried to shut them down as of
| 2020. Pretty cool tool.
| muhehe wrote:
| Ah, the original design. I must say I miss it. I don't think is
| pretty or nice, but it had a soul and was very easy to navigate.
| Pretty much like old windows (and apps) - quite ugly actually,
| but distinctive, well though and easy to use (mostly).
|
| Sorry for the nostalgia:)
| love2read wrote:
| Cool stuff, shame to see steps haven't been posted since the
| original article in October.
| devos50 wrote:
| Thanks! I got a bit busy lately and I don't expect to have too
| much time since I'm moving to another country soon. Hopefully I
| find some time to write a more in-depth article on some inner
| black magic of various peripherals. I think the NAND storage is
| particularly interesting.
|
| Regarding the progress of the current iPod Touch 1G emulator:
| I'm currently stuck on a nasty bug where a piece of memory
| seems to be mapped incorrectly and the emulator crashes when
| trying to render the keyboard. I'm still not entirely sure
| where this originates from though.
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| I still have an iPod Touch 1G in the cupboard. Not my original
| (first production batch) sadly, as I did a warranty swap about 10
| months in.
|
| I've fond memories of jailbreaking (TIFF exploit at
| jailbreakme.com) moments after the exploit was published on IRC.
| Used Installer to install apps because Apple said they would
| never allow third-party native apps and that WebClips were the
| way of the future.
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| > _iPod Touch 1G running the first iOS version ever released_
|
| My memory may be hazy, but I don't believe the iPod Touch was
| ever released publicly with iPhone OS 1.0. Arrived at my front
| door a few days before release in store and was running iPhone
| OS 1.1. Had encryption enabled where as iPhone OS 1.0 shipped
| to the iPhone 2G (that's cellular 2G) without it enabled for
| some reason. Whatever the reason that was a big help to the
| early jailbreaking community.
| atkbrah wrote:
| I also have ipod touch 1G in my drawer but instead of iOS it's
| running android (because why not). Or maybe it was dual boot, I
| can't remember. Android performance was pretty horrible and it
| was more of a party trick than actual usable system.
| taviso wrote:
| Fun story, that TIFF bug was one of mine (CVE-2006-3459), I
| actually found it in an audit sponsored by Google!
|
| The same bug was also used to jailbreak the PSP and other
| random devices. For a few years I would occasionally get mail
| from people thanking me for helping them jailbreak their DVD
| player or smart appliance.
|
| I've never actually owned an iPhone, I wrote an exploit for
| Linux/x86, then someone else (cmw) ported it to iPhone and made
| the jailbreakme website!
| rhplus wrote:
| The skeuomorphic YouTube icon always looks so chintzy to me. Does
| anyone know how/why that came to be? Did Google just not care
| enough about branding at that point to insist on using the real
| logo?
| spikeagally wrote:
| I believe the YouTube app at that time was built by Apple, not
| by Google. Similar to Maps.
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(page generated 2022-12-22 23:00 UTC)