Senior Riley Testut stared at his iPhone as he watched his Twitter account explode with more than 11.5 thousand active followers, almost all gained over the past couple months. Testut, however, did not suddenly make thousands of friends. The abundance of followers are people who downloaded Testut’s app – a Game Boy emulator.
A year and a half ago, still a sophomore, Testut found an old, existing code online of an emulator application that let him play games like Pokémon on his iPhone. After months of modifying the code, Testut integrated the childhood Gameboy Advanced game system into the iPhone device in a way that jail breaking the smartphone becomes unnecessary.
Testut first began recoding the existing Gameboy apps that were available only for Jailbroken phones. Then, he worked on making the app compatible with unmodified, or “hacked”, software. Unlike owners of unjailbroken phones, people with jailbroken iPhones enjoy the benefit of illegally downloading apps and obtaining free software.
“Jailbreaking your phone, essentially hacking your device, is not supported by Apple and voids your warranty,” Testut said.
To avoid the risk of the illegal practice, however, Testut was determined to make the app available to everyone who shares his childhood memories of playing Pokémon and other Nintendo games.
Since June 2013, Testut’s app has been downloaded 50 thousand times.
Like many success stories, Testut tried and failed, noting that he encountered more than 50 unsuccessful trials. He would lock himself in his room for hours after school trying to get the app to work. Testut would spend up to 30 hours a week re-mastering the app.
“The first time I tried to get the app to work, the program gave me 999+ errors,” Testut said.
It wasn’t until June that he found a way to open the app on a normal phone. He called the app GBA4iOS. Although this app is unavailable in the app store due to Apple’s policy on emulators, Testut made his app available for download from his own Web site, for free.
“I like seeing people use it more than I like getting money for it,” Testut said.
The app has also helped Testut in the relationship department.
“It’s only because of my app that I have my current relationship,” Testut said. “This summer a random girl tweeted about my app, and we just started talking. I went to California to meet her, and we spent three days together. I would actually be dating her officially if we weren’t so many states apart.”
For Testut, being a senior means that he might be moving to California soon enough as a college freshman.
Combining both of his sisters’ majors, Testut plans to study computer science, and minor in psychology. After college, Testut, who is influenced by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, hopes to work for Apple or even start his own company.
“If you really want to do something, you could just do it yourself, nothing can stop you.” Testut said.
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