Developers are still working on emulating older iOS games, this time on new iPhones.

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

Developers are making progress on a tool that can emulate old iOS games

A developer shares his progress on his work with the touchHLE tool on social network X. In recent weeks, he has not only managed to emulate several more complex games, but also ported the tool to work on modern iOS devices. In one example, the developer showed the classic Super Monkey Ball running on an iPhone SE running 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 older games alive. As iOS evolves and some APIs are no longer supported, legacy apps that no longer receive updates become incompatible with the latest versions of the operating system.

For example, modern iPhones and iPads may not run 32-bit apps, so they cannot 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 to carry old hardware.

Besides Super Monkey Ball, we have seen developers successfully launch games. such as Shrek, Resident Evil and Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3D with touchHLE. Of course, this is all very experimental and limited at the moment, but it's always interesting to see how developers are working to get iOS apps running 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.

With At this point everything else is more or less easy to hack. (well, the texture coordinates are still wrong…)

Enjoy my exquisite collection of various rendering problems: pic.twitter.com/PMGBWGV0gI

— ciciplusplus (@ciciplusplus) January 20, 2024