Fans save iPod clickwheel games for posterity

Apple's iPod is gone—phased out between 2014 and 1017, with the touchscreen version discontinued in 2019—but the ingenious clickwheel interface is immortal. Fans of games that used it are evading Apple's DRM controls to rescue those titles from the history books, reports Kyle Orland at Ars Technica. Thanks to a convenience baked into Apple's implementation, it's legal: the "digital locks" do not have to be boltcut.

Luckily for the sizable community of classic iPod enthusiasts, there is a bit of a workaround for this legacy DRM issue. Clickwheel iPod owners with working copies of any of these games (either in their iTunes library or on an iPod itself) are still able to re-authorize their account through Apple's servers to sync with a secondary installation of iTunes. If multiple iPod owners each reauthorize their accounts to the same iTunes installation, that copy of iTunes effectively becomes a "master library" containing authorized copies of the games from all of those accounts (there's a five-account limit per iTunes installation, but it can be bypassed by copying the files manually). That iTunes installation then becomes a distribution center that can share those authorized games to any number of iPods indefinitely, without the need for any online check-ins with Apple.

The action is happening on Reddit and the code is on Github.