The Old iPhone Games May Now Run on PCs, thanks to Emulator

Many game developers have been developing applications that will run on the iPhone and iPod touchscreen since App Store was introduced in 2008.

Super Monkey Ball, Flight Control, and Angry Birds are only a few examples of highly successful mobile applications that made Apple’s smartphones very popular. Because of their age and insufficient advancement, many games aren’t accessible on modern devices.

However, one programmer has devised a way to emulate the effects in the computer.

Transferring iPhone Apps onto PC

IPhone operating system (OS) on a Mac and a Windows computer. 9to5Mac included Hikari no Yume, who developed the new application called touchHLE to celebrate this year’s iPhone software development kit’s (SDK) 15th anniversary. It lets users play games initially designed to run iPhone users.

Since iOS is Apple-exclusive and designed to run exclusively on specific hardware, it’s not unusual that only a few have been able to emulate the iOS system successfully.

But the fact is, like others, have proven that it is much easier to emulate older versions of iOS as the older versions are more secure and have fewer recognized vulnerabilities and use smaller hardware. Instead of trying to emulate the entire iOS, Hikari developed a way to run just a few applications.

Supported Games

Particularly, Hikari hoped to reboot the popular game from the past called Super Monkey Ball. Therefore, touch was designed towards gaming simulation. It can emulate the actions of buttons, play audio, and use joysticks to play games that typically rely on accelerometers, for example, the Super Monkey Ball.

Hikari claims she came up with and developed the concept in her free time. Hikari told the Top Tier List that she had taken steps to avoid accusations of copyright infringement. She has stayed clear of the use of any code created by Apple.

“I do not use any code created by Apple. I’ve avoided taking a reverse engineering approach to the iPhone OS itself. In order to utilize the project and my code, it is not necessary to infringe Apple’s copyright rights.”

Hikari mentions that the program is compatible with games such as Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3D because its computer requirements are identical to those in Super Monkey Ball, given that both games were released at the same time.

Of course, an emulator can’t run the most recent and complex games due to the hardware requirements.

Observing the evolution of iOS emulators for different platforms is fascinating. In the wake of the discontinuation of support for 32-bit applications with iOS, many gamers were left unable to play old-fashioned games again. Thanks to initiatives like Hikari’s, it is now possible to play these games again.

There’s a video demonstrating touchHLE’s capabilities in the channel Stop Skeletons from Fighting. If you’d like to try the emulator, the software source for the emulator is accessible on GitHub.