Prince of Persia: Time Run, the lost 2015 iOS game, is playable again after 10+ years.

We actually found it. After years of this being a dead end for anyone who went looking, Prince of Persia: Time Run runs again.

Quick background for anyone who's never heard of it. Time Run was an endless runner Ubisoft soft launched on the iOS App Store in Australia and New Zealand back in October 2015. Wall running, a time rewind mechanic, flying carpet sections, basically a Prince of Persia coat of paint on a runner. It got a brief wider release and then Ubisoft pulled the plug on May 24, 2016 and yanked it from the store. Under seven months from launch to shutdown. Because it only ever shipped on iOS, once it left the App Store it was just gone. No physical copy, no re-release, nothing. If you didn't have it installed or sitting in a backup, that was it.

A bunch of us have been chasing it since around 2020 with nothing to show for it. The break came this year when u/Persian_of_Interest tracked down Techzamazing, a YouTuber who had added the game to his Apple account while it was still live, and who was willing to work with us to get it back.

That got us a decrypted IPA. Which then refused to launch. The game leans on old SDK calls that modern iOS doesn't answer the same way anymore, so it crashed on startup, and under PlayCover on Apple Silicon the background rendered as a black void. We wrote a few small dynamic libraries to patch around each problem. One for the launch crash, one to kill the dead Game Center and StoreKit sign in prompts, and one to fix the PlayCover graphics. Full writeup of what each fix does is on GitHub: (Link)

So here's where things stand:

• Anyone with an iPhone or an Apple Silicon Mac (through PlayCover) can play it now.
• Patched IPAs and the decrypted original are up on the Internet Archive: (Link)
• Prefer to build your own instead of trusting a random IPA? The archive has the clean decrypted base, and the GitHub scripts let you generate the patches yourself.
• There are optional "everything unlocked" builds too. A lot of the skins were locked behind a Facebook invite link that's been dead for years, so this is the only way to actually see them now.

Heads up: the game was never finished, so there's no proper ending. All the released levels are playable though, as far as we could test.

Huge thanks to u/gpranav25, u/Clovergruff64, u/Persian_of_Interest, and Techzamazing for making this happen. Next we'd love to get it running on other platforms, so if you know the engine or want to help, say so.

Built OpenSave because I got tired of Steam Cloud only covering half my library. It's peer-to-peer,pair your Deck and PC once with a room code, and any save (Steam, emulator, GOG, whatever) syncs the moment it changes. No account, nothing stored on a server you don't control.

It auto-finds saves inside Proton prefixes too, so most Deck games are detected without pointing it at anything manually. There's an official Flatpak that runs on stock SteamOS in Desktop Mode.

Free, open source with MIT License, no catch: https://open-save.vercel.app

Happy to answer questions, also very open to any and all reports!

Source: https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/2088383316256829512

I played Armory and machine 2 ages ago, I loved the visual design, I loved the story, and I enjoyed that I could forget about it for awhile and pick it back up to see a ton of progress.

I'm aware of the games history: being received as a poor sequel to the first, devs supposedly dropping the ball on development while not listening to the community, and it being desisted from app stores along with the servers being shut down.

This game holds a special place in my heart, so I wanted to ask;

Is it really gone? Is there not one copy of the game out there for download? A&M1 is great, but A&M2 is really what im looking for.

Is A&M2 really lost media?

While going through my room, I found the tablet I used as a kid. I’d left it lying around until 2023, when I found it again, loaded it up with games, and… I lost it again—and now I’ve found it once more.

I noticed it has several games that are no longer available on the Play Store. That tablet doesn’t have any APKs or malicious files, which is why I’d like to know if there’s a way to extract the APKs from the games.

JUST SO YOU KNOW... It can’t connect to the internet anymore; no matter how hard I try, it always disconnects within seconds of connecting to a Wi-Fi network.

Playgen games released a series of "serious games" in the 2000s, teaching young people about politics, infrastructure and science. Their more well known game is floodsim.

It is a rather niche area in games.

This game explores how to make and fund government policy and features politicians of the era including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.

Somehow I have an original copy my dad downloaded when I was very young when it was still a newish game. I do remember playing it. Somehow it made it across to my 2013 HDD and I found it going through that drive after fixing it recently corrupting its file system, prompting some digital archaeology. I'm lucky the drive didn't die.

Link: https://archive.org/details/serious-policy-v-1.1

Hey guys, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but maybe some of you will like the idea.

After seeing Sony announce the end of physical games, I got inspired by creators like ArchadesGames on YouTube to build my own physical "cartridges" for PC games using SD cards.

As a sysadmin, I wanted a plug-and-play framework for DRM-free games that:

• Works cross-platform (Windows & Linux).
• Has zero or minimal OS footprint.
• Keeps save files on the Card (or syncs them back necessary)
• Gives that physical, "one game at a time" single-purpose console feel—no secondary screen distractions, no decision fatigue.

I spent a few days putting together DreamCard (DRM(free) + Card). Here is how it works:

First Time Windows

• The first time I insert an SD card formatted configured as DreamCard into the computer, I can install an autostart script. This script mimics the functionality of the autostart.inf files from the early 2000s, but only responds to DreamCards.

User Experience

• Windows: I insert the game into my computer's SD card reader, and the launcher starts. It's modeled after the DreamCards design, launches the game, handles game file synchronization in the background for games that inevitably need to write to the user directory, displays the playtime, and essentially serves as the landing page. I press “Launch Game” and my game starts
• Linux (Ubuntu/Proton): Plugging the card into Linux reveals an additional partition (ext4 for Proton runtime data). Instead of the launcher, running a simple shell script launches the game through Proton with access to the exact same saves as Windows.

Partition Structure

SD Card
├── Partition 1: Companion [exFAT]
│   ├── Install_Companion.bat / UnInstall_Companion.bat
│   └── scripts/ (PowerShell detection scripts)
├── Partition 2: Proton [ext4]
│   └── (Proton prefix & runtime data)
└── Partition 3: GameData [exFAT]
├── Launcher.ps1 / Start_Game.ps1 / Start_Game.sh
├── resources/ (game icon, metadata JSON)
└── game/ (Complete DRM-free game directory)

Current Status & To-Dos

• Tested Games: Currently working with Gothic 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Morrowind (via OpenMW because why not).
• Linux Integration: Linux isn't my main strength yet, so while the shell execution works via Proton, I'd like to clean up the backend logic eventually. Some games need a bit more work for the save sync on Linux.
• Compatibility: Needs broader testing across distros (Bazzite, Debian, SteamDeck).
• Witcher 3: Or something more modern that needs to run on an SSD or a faster SD Card. Havent reached the speed limit of the sd card yet
• Shelf Space: As soon as the cases and printable stickers arrive, I plan to add the games to my collection. Of course, I still need to come up with covers and a consistent design language.

Would love to hear thoughts, edge-case warnings, or ideas to make it more fun.

Oh, and the GUI looks a little overdesigned on purpose. I wanted a mix of 80s synthwave aesthetics and hypermodern design. I think it looks like fun, not a work application.

The only link archiving them, no longer exists and no other archives exist (that I could find).

There's DLC for the UK, US, UK, FR, GE, and JP versions. Each region having unique books that people could've downloaded through the internet on the DS.

For a complete list of every book that people were able to download

Links for more information:

Complete list of every book that people were able to download 100 Classic Book Collection - Wikipedia

The original forum that once had the games archived, but now the link no longer works due to the website being taken down. Preserving DS saves with the DLC flags unlocked | GBAtemp.net - The Independent Video Game Community

Hey everyone I've got a petition here that I've made in hopes that 2K Games can from now on add end of life support to unlock all content locked behind servers from characters such as Goldberg and Nikki Bella to attires and variants tied to MyFaction. From a game preservation standpoint and out of good standing this should be the standard already.

https://c.org/ySLjF2XBVn

\- Petition link.