8 ms·

Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)

335 points by zdw 4y ago

2Gkashmiri 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    >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?)
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    i had an N70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N70 can you imagine going from this brick to an iphone? maybe you had one of those communicators or meego whatever nokia was doing... those were good devices for the time but i did not have them
robotnikman 4y ago
The skeuomorphic design of early iOS is certainly nostalgic.
- jonas-w 4y ago
  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 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    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=skeuomorphism https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
  - fredoralive 4y ago
    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...
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      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.
joenot443 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 https://devos50.github.io/assets/pdf/iom.pdf) and by deobfuscating strings in obfuscated Android APKs (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf).
  - user_7832 4y ago
    As a TUD student, it makes me happy to see folks like you put out such amazing work. Congrats!
Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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!
  - blamazon 4y ago
    > For a few years I would occasionally get mail from people thanking me for helping them jailbreak their DVD player or smart appliance. That is delightful and brightened my day! Thanks for sharing :)
kitsunesoba 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I have tens of gigabytes of my own archived IPAs waiting for this to happen. That era of apps was so charming and uncynical.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    Please make sure you've decrypted them. The IPA files iTunes saves to disk have DRM and will become useless once Apple shuts down the relevant servers.
    - bangonkeyboard 4y ago
      Is there any way to do that without a slow copy back and forth to a jailbroken device?
      - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
        Not that I know of, sadly. But bear in mind it's only the executable file that's encrypted, the rest of the ZIP file (the .ipa) doesn't need to be copied.
love2read 4y ago
Cool stuff, shame to see steps haven’t been posted since the original article in October.
- devos50 4y ago
  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.
janjones 4y ago
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 https://github.com/ipasimulator/ipasim [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC
- zbowling 4y ago
  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.
  - EMIRELADERO 4y ago
    Contractual constraints?
- Cloudef 4y ago
  Darling [1] also wants to support iOS API translation [1] https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
- zydeco 4y ago
  I did something similar, but targeting macOS on x86_64, so a lot of things were available through catalyst: https://github.com/zydeco/aah https://github.com/zydeco/aah I abandoned it when macs with Apple Silicon were announced, only some simple apps could run (GeekBench would crash through the Lua test iirc)
muhehe 4y ago
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:)
mortenjorck 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Windows 95 felt inspired by NeXTSTEP, so there's a common lineage.
  - garganzol 4y ago
    As they say: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      Great artists steal from... other great artists? :)
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Maybe we are just looking at things through nostalgia goggles? Maybe current generation kids would hate Windows 95 and iOS 1.
stuckkeys 4y ago
Not advertising, but apple did have beef with https://www.corellium.com/ https://www.corellium.com/ -they tried to shut them down as of 2020. Pretty cool tool.
rhplus 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I believe the YouTube app at that time was built by Apple, not by Google. Similar to Maps.
  - blamazon 4y ago
    If I remember correctly Apple built the app in relative secrecy so that iPhone could open YouTube links at launch without supporting flash, and Google was okay with that because it drove growth in YouTube and Android was in infancy, but the arrangement ended in 2012: https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-06-youtube-app-removed-from-ios-6-ios-5-confirmation-official.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-06-youtube-app-removed-from...
israrkhan 4y ago
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.
gaucheries 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33192015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33192015
lemax 4y ago
This brings me back to jailbreaking my iPod Touch on OS 1.1.1 when I was like 12. What a groundbreaking mobile OS this was.
qubex 4y ago
I still have my first gen iPod Touch. It’s still hooked up to my grandmother’s early 1970s stereo. I even bought the upgrade to iPhone inbuilt apps. (Memory escapes me right now.)

335 points by zdw 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  >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?)
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  i had an N70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N70 can you imagine going from this brick to an iphone? maybe you had one of those communicators or meego whatever nokia was doing... those were good devices for the time but i did not have them

robotnikman 4y ago

The skeuomorphic design of early iOS is certainly nostalgic.

jonas-w 4y ago
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 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- vlunkr 4y ago
  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=skeuomorphism https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
- fredoralive 4y ago
  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...
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    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.

joenot443 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 https://devos50.github.io/assets/pdf/iom.pdf) and by deobfuscating strings in obfuscated Android APKs (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf).
- user_7832 4y ago
  As a TUD student, it makes me happy to see folks like you put out such amazing work. Congrats!

Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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!
- blamazon 4y ago
  > For a few years I would occasionally get mail from people thanking me for helping them jailbreak their DVD player or smart appliance. That is delightful and brightened my day! Thanks for sharing :)

kitsunesoba 4y ago

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 4y ago
I have tens of gigabytes of my own archived IPAs waiting for this to happen. That era of apps was so charming and uncynical.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  Please make sure you've decrypted them. The IPA files iTunes saves to disk have DRM and will become useless once Apple shuts down the relevant servers.
  - bangonkeyboard 4y ago
    Is there any way to do that without a slow copy back and forth to a jailbroken device?
    - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
      Not that I know of, sadly. But bear in mind it's only the executable file that's encrypted, the rest of the ZIP file (the .ipa) doesn't need to be copied.

love2read 4y ago

Cool stuff, shame to see steps haven’t been posted since the original article in October.

devos50 4y ago
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.

janjones 4y ago

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 https://github.com/ipasimulator/ipasim [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC

zbowling 4y ago
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.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  Contractual constraints?
Cloudef 4y ago
Darling [1] also wants to support iOS API translation [1] https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
zydeco 4y ago
I did something similar, but targeting macOS on x86_64, so a lot of things were available through catalyst: https://github.com/zydeco/aah https://github.com/zydeco/aah I abandoned it when macs with Apple Silicon were announced, only some simple apps could run (GeekBench would crash through the Lua test iirc)

muhehe 4y ago

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:)

mortenjorck 4y ago

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 4y ago

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 4y ago
Windows 95 felt inspired by NeXTSTEP, so there's a common lineage.
- garganzol 4y ago
  As they say: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    Great artists steal from... other great artists? :)
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Maybe we are just looking at things through nostalgia goggles? Maybe current generation kids would hate Windows 95 and iOS 1.

stuckkeys 4y ago

Not advertising, but apple did have beef with https://www.corellium.com/ https://www.corellium.com/ -they tried to shut them down as of 2020. Pretty cool tool.

rhplus 4y ago

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 4y ago
I believe the YouTube app at that time was built by Apple, not by Google. Similar to Maps.
- blamazon 4y ago
  If I remember correctly Apple built the app in relative secrecy so that iPhone could open YouTube links at launch without supporting flash, and Google was okay with that because it drove growth in YouTube and Android was in infancy, but the arrangement ended in 2012: https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-06-youtube-app-removed-from-ios-6-ios-5-confirmation-official.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-06-youtube-app-removed-from...

israrkhan 4y ago

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.

gaucheries 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33192015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33192015

lemax 4y ago

This brings me back to jailbreaking my iPod Touch on OS 1.1.1 when I was like 12. What a groundbreaking mobile OS this was.

qubex 4y ago

I still have my first gen iPod Touch. It’s still hooked up to my grandmother’s early 1970s stereo. I even bought the upgrade to iPhone inbuilt apps. (Memory escapes me right now.)