Gaming on iPhone is something that has come on in leaps and bounds since the inception of the iPhone, and while little throwaway games like Angry Birds are still very popular, there is now a lot more out there for the ‘core gamer’ as well thanks to the likes of Assassin’s Creed – Altair’s Chronicles, Chaos Rings and Grand Theft Auto.

However if you are a nerd who likes to go beyond the normal capabilities of your devices then this might not be enough for you and you might yearn to play the likes of Super Meat Boy or Super Mario on your phone. Well good the good news is that if you are willing to tinker, then there are various ways you can get a number of different games running on your device that were never meant to be there. Here we will look at how that’s possible.

Flash Games

Apple has some kind of grudge against Adobe Flash which is apparently down to some problems with Flash’s security (I secretly wonder if perhaps the name is just too similar for Apple’s liking?) and this has been a well-known fact for some time causing frustration among many Apple fans.

The problem is that there is a lot of good Flash content out there, including a large number of great games like the Original Super Meat Boy and the wonderful Yeti Sports (who remembers that??). Well worry not as there are some ways you can get around this restriction. One of these is to try and use some of the not-so-perfect Flash supporting browsers available for iPhone on the App store. The other more effective way however is to Jailbreak your phone, and then to get yourself to the Cydia store where you can download a proper SWF player. Then you can even play Super Mario World Flash or Super Smash Flash – but I recommend getting a Bluetooth keyboard for better input.

Roms

And seeing as you’ve jailbroken your device, why not install an emulator for a console like the Megadrive or the SNES. Then, if you own the original cartridges, you will be allowed to legally download the ROMs for the games you want to play on your iPhone so that you can enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, Golden Axe or whatever else takes your fancy. Then there’s the DosBox emulator (DosPad) that will enable you to actually install MsDos on your iPhone complete with whichever old .exe files you fancy running – from JazzJackrabbit to Duke Nukem 2. In fact you can even install Windows 95 and that will give you access to Minesweeper and even Chip’s Challenge.

TeamViewer

And then there are the various apps that let you view and control your computer, which of course will let you in theory play anything that’s on your PC screen. Of course it’s far too slow to really enjoy anything that is going to require any kind of graphics or sound. However what you can play is pretty much anything that doesn’t. So again you’re good to play Minesweeper… But then you can also play Solitaire or maybe something in a browser. It’s not necessarily that useful or fun, but again if you’re a true nerd then you might enjoy showing it off to friends…