A game preservation project that aims to revive and preserve all the clickwheel games ever released for Apple iPods has piqued people’s interest online, especially within the growing community of iPod enthusiasts and users who are actively keeping the legacy of the iconic portable media player alive through modding and hardware upgrades.
The goal of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project is to preserve and make publicly accessible all iPod Clickwheel Games for supported devices including iPod Classics 5G to 7G and iPod Nanos 3G to 5G.
According to the preservation project, the virtual machine can boot as quickly as possible and is typically rather fast even without hardware virtualization enabled because it is built on a community-trusted very lite version of Windows 10 LTSC 2019 (ARM64 macs have to emulate x64 code). This virtual machine is also a fully offline distribution center setup that users can setup at home on their PCs to distribute authed games on any iPod.
As of the moment, 43 out of the 54 clickwheel games have been preserved and are currently playable right now on the aforementioned iPod devices.
Some of the latest additions to the games that have been preserved include Sonic the Hedgehog, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, Tetris, UNO, Monopoly, PAC-MAN, and Zuma to name a few.
iPod enthusiasts, users, and fans took to social media to share their insights about the said game preservation.
One user wrote, “This is really awesome! I love how far this project has come. Been using patched firmware on my iPod Video since 2008.”
Another user wrote, “Wow, never thought that there were lots of games for this kind of iPod. I only played Klondike and Quiz on my lost nano 4th. I thought it was just a ‘nice to have’ feature.”
A third user wrote, “YOU ARE A MADMAN THIS IS INCREDIBLE NICE WORK!!!!”
One user on X expressed their excitement and wrote, “Today was a hugeee day for iPod Clickwheel game preservation with all those games! I just setup the VM and synced them to my Classic and Nano, feels unreal to finally be able to play these!”
Back in 2011, the clickwheel games were removed from the iTunes store and it was unclear as to why the games suddenly disappeared.
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