Developers are still working on emulating old iOS games, this time on newer iPhones

February 20, 2024

3 min read

We wrote last year about touchHLE, an open-source tool created by developer Hikari no Yume to emulate old iOS apps on macOS and Windows. Based on this project, another developer managed to emulate these old iOS apps on Android – and now “ciciplusplus” has successfully ported this tool to iOS (yes, that’s right).

The developer has been sharing the progress of his work with the touchHLE tool on the X social network. In recent weeks, he has not only managed to emulate some more complex games, but has also ported the tool to run on modern iOS devices. In one of the examples, the developer showed the classic Super Monkey Ball running on an iPhone SE with iOS 15.8.

But what’s the point of emulating iOS apps on iOS? As we detailed in a previous article, the idea behind touchHLE is to keep old games alive. With the evolution of iOS and the deprecation of some APIs, apps that are too old and no longer receive updates are not compatible with the latest versions of the operating system.

For example, modern iPhones and iPads can’t run 32-bit apps, so they can’t run most apps from the early days of the App Store. With touchHLE, those who miss these apps and games will have another chance to play them again without having an old piece of hardware.

In addition to Super Monkey Ball, we’ve seen developers successfully run games like Shrek, Resident Evil, and Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3D with touchHLE. Of course, it’s all very experimental and limited at this point, but it’s always interesting to see how developers are working to run iOS apps on different platforms.

You can find the source code for the touchHLE project on GitHub. Are there any old iOS games you’d like to emulate on a modern device? Let us know in the comments section below.

From that point, everything else is more or less strait-forward to hack. (well, texture coordinates is still wrong…)

Please enjoy my exquisite collection of different rendering issues: pic.twitter.com/PMGBWGV0gI

— ciciplusplus (@ciciplusplus) January 20, 2024