Apple TV 4 details revealed: Siri remote limits gaming, older remotes work with new Apple TV, and more

Apple TV dev kits are trickling into developers who participated in the dev kit lottery last week. Apple is providing some developers with an early look at the new Apple TV hardware by giving away full blown developer kit models, which come complete with a new Apple TV, Siri remote, and all of the other accessories necessary to use the next-gen set top box.

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has revealed through a series of tweets that the Apple TV will automatically light up the screen of your TV when you pick up the Siri remote. Additionally, remotes of existing Apple TVs also work with the new Apple TV, though obviously they will not be able to provide you with access to Siri since they lack a dedicated button for it. The older remotes can be used to navigate around tvOS on the new Apple TV just fine.

Another developer, James Addyman, has gone ahead and created an emulator for the new Apple TV called Provenance. It supports emulators for Sega’s Genesis, Master System, Mega CD, NES, SNES, Gameboy, and Gameboy Advance.Don’t get your hopes high on Apple approving the game emulator for the Apple TV’s App Store though.

The emulator is far from perfect and still requires a lot of work. Addyman notes that he still needs to determine when the new Apple TV deletes its local contents and how he will map the buttons of the old Sega and Nintendo gamepads on the new Siri remote of Apple TV, which essentially only has one button for input.

So the gamepad situation is even more dire: you have dpad, accelerometer, and one button. They *really* need to revert that gamepad decision
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) September 18, 2015

Raise to wake
Speaking of the Siri Remote, it can sense when the device has been picked up, and will automatically wake up the interface when it is. This means that you don’t have to actually press any buttons when first picking up the remote in order to get started.

So what do you think ?