How to play classic consoles on Apple TV 4 (and iPhone)

The fourth generation Apple TV has several important new features, but I think we all agree that its greatest attraction is that it has its own App Store. At the moment there are not as many applications as in iOS, not even close, but it is only a matter of time that we can do almost anything with our Apple TV 4. And speaking of doing almost anything, there is one that we can do that makes us special illusion to those of us who play at classic consoles such as the Master System II and Mega Drive by SEGA or the Nintendo and Super Nintendo by Nintendo (Doh!), and we can play the titles of these consoles thanks to James Addyman, developer who has created Provenance, a multi-console emulator.

To install it, we will take advantage of the fact that Apple no longer asks for a paid developer account to be able to test the applications. In this way, we will only have to get the source code of an emulator and dump it to our Apple TV (or iPhone and iPad) with Xcode. It is a process that, although it is true that we can make mistakes, it is quite simple when we have already done it once. We detail the process below.

How to play classic consoles on Apple TV

What do we need:

• USB-C cable
• Xcode
• The source code of the application
• Apple Developer Account (Free)

How to install Provenance

1. We register as developers at THIS LINK.
2. We connect the Apple TV to the Mac with the USB-C cable and to a power outlet with the corresponding cable.
3. We go to the page where the application code is hosted and copy its URL. In this case, the Provenance website which is on GitHub, from where we will copy the Clone URL.
4. We open Xcode and go to Source Control / Check Out.
5. We paste the URL that we had copied in the painting that we see in the window that opens to us.
6. If there is more than one file when it finishes uploading, we choose Master. Then we click on Next.
7. A new window will open automatically. In this window, we have to choose (in this case) Provenance and then ProvenanceTV-release.
8. We choose our Apple TV and click on the triangle button (like Play). This will start compiling the application.
9. There will be bugs, but we will fix them choosing our Apple ID y renaming the file (as you can see in the video) in the main section of the application. Then we hit play again, it will finish compiling and install the application. You have to wait to see the message of «Build success ».

How to upload ROMs to Provenance

Now we only have to upload the ROMs to Provenance. For this we will do the following:

1. We open Provenance on our Apple TV.
2. select Import ROM. This will show us a URL.
3. We write the URL that the previous step gave us in the navigator from our computer.
4. We choose the folder «roma"(important, that in the video is wrong) and then we choose Upload ROM.
5. We go back to Apple TV, we close the window where we saw the URL that we put in the browser and we will see all the games that we have uploaded with their covers and everything.

And that's it. As you can see in the following video, the control with the Siri Remote is not very good. The Play / Pause button is the jump button and the touch pad click is the shoot button. The best thing would be to have an MFi remote, something I think I will end up buying.

The system works on the iPhone

This system also works on the iPhone. Everything is practically the same, with the only difference that we will have to choose the iPhone file when we are performing the steps in Xcode. To put the ROMs on the iPhone we only have to do it with iTunes, just as we do with any other application that accepts files.