This is another one of those, "gee I wish I had time to make that" things – and this is a bit of a brain dump. In a nut shell I would really like to have this:

I want my iPhone to act like an old Nintendo controller that controls a game emulator running on my Mac either via the USB connector or bluetooth.

Now if you are not into retro Nintendo games, and don’t immediately see why this would be totally cool, hear me out – this would be my nirvana situation. (plus the whole "iPhone UI changing to a controller that does things to my Mac via bluetooth" has many other applications)

A lot of people in my generation like old Nintendo games. I still play them, and some of my friends do too. (I am not sure how prevalent the market is, but I would be willing to bet it’s somewhat large, and would be larger if something like this existed).

The whole backlog of the Nintendo catalog could be sold over iTunes, and you could play the games on Apple TV on your computer. Emulators already exist for Mac OS X, and the resources these emulators require is not huge.

Apple could get a sense of the casual gaming market, and Nintendo could make some money off items that are just sitting there. Heck, I mean if they charged $4 per game, it’s money they were not getting before. If it worked out, they could open it up a bit more…

This might even work with the WII titles. The iPhone has XYZ sensors – you could make some really neat games using that. Of course, iPod touches would work as well.

There could even be "lite" versions of the games that continued on the iPhone when you disconnected from the main platform (the laptop or Apple TV or whatever). Like you have to keep feeding your character or it’ll die – I don’t know things like that.

I would be fun if Nintendo released an SDK, or set of tools, to start new games on the old platform too. I’d like to play a new Legend of Zelda game. (I wish they would do that anyway.)

But in it’s simplest form, I’d like a controller application to play emulation games on my Mac. All the pieces are already there. The emulator, game roms (which are currently only legal if you own the physical game I think), and the ability to use USB to control the emulators.

I think if a non-company (aka hacker) is going to make this, they’ll have to use a jail broken iPhone as I think the Apple SDK doesn’t give you access to the USB (an bluetooth?). There is already a jail broken application that does all this already on the iPhone itself, but I almost always have my laptop and phone with me and I’d rather use a bigger screen.

Oh well, one can dream.