Anyway to emulate recover 1st gen ios games?

[marigul]

I have a few prototype 1st gen ios games from a popular franchise. Is there any easy way to extract the ipa off the ipad?

 

[Chaotic Mind]

I don't think there is without jailbreaking it first. Cannot be 100% sure as I don't touch Apple products but what little I do know says you will most likely have to jailbreak to dump the ipa files.

 

[no1]

Back it up using iTunes. That's one way to preserve it. Also depending on the iPad's age you might be able to rip them off without jailbreaking.

 

[Dracarys]

Back it up using iTunes. That's one way to preserve it. Also depending on the iPad's age you might be able to rip them off without jailbreaking.

iTues will shut down this year so I'm not sure that's a viable solution.

 

[HI_RICKY]

first gen iOS app should be no encrypt, rename .ipa to zip you can unpack it
if you looking run it, use old Xcode or old iOS device is ok

 

[marigul]

I was able to get the .ipa, but it didn't seem like a valid file when I tried to run it on another device. The ipad I think is jailbroken but my iphone is not. I can run it, however old ipad have for the most part surpassed their functional life and I wanted to get it on a newer device, but it's possible it may not run on it anyway.

 

[Trimesh]

It depends on how old the .ipa is - if it's old enough, there is a distinct possibility that it relies on APIs that have gone away. In this case, getting it to work may require a lot of work.
In any case, getting it off the device is the first step.

 

[marigul]

When I got it off the device, I couldn't tell if it was valid since I couldn't get it to run...but I guess I should pull it off again and just save it. I may have the source, but I think that may be lost. The game is from around maybe 2009-2010.

 

[b1100101]

iTues will shut down this year so I'm not sure that's a viable solution.

The app on Mac will be split up in multiple apps in macOS 10.15.
That's all there is to it.
Most stuff regarding iPhones will be in the Finder then.

 

[Greg2600]

I was actually talking about this with friends yesterday. When you think of really all mobile games, for Android, iOS, whatever, the preservation has to be incredibly difficult. Not only do you need the game files, but you would likely need the SAME OS version that those files match up to. That's due to all the updates.

 

[cta]

but you would likely need the SAME OS version that those files match up to.

Not sure about IOS, but on Android I bet you could get away with any (newer) OS version in 99% of cases. Increasing the "make sure we're running on ver.x" value in the app's metadata doesn't necessarily mean the code will also rely on new APIs. I bet the majority of apps on the store right now could run on much older phones if the SDK didn't force a somewhat recent version to check for as the minimum (beefy hardware requirements due to bloat and/or coder lazyness notwithstanding).