touchHLE VS dynarmic

If you still have the IPA file for it, you should look into seeing if it runs on touchHLE [1], an emulator for early versions of iOS. They also have an app archive if you'd like to give permission for them to preserve the game.

[1]: https://touchhle.org/

[2]: https://touchhle.org/app-archive/

This project is the most promising and it does what you say, except they're starting with iOS 1.0 so you'll have to be patient!

https://touchhle.org/

Very interesting. The "why" context seems to be buried in an issue comment https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/issues/181#issuec... and I guess the purpose is to emulate old iOS games, from the early Cambrian explosion of ideas at the start of the App Store. This is also an era I am nostalgic for, with lots of new concepts, art pieces, and indie games, before anyone knew how to sustainably monetize, for better or worse. For example, Distant Shore is definitely a relic from a simpler time! https://johnnybgamer.com/2009/08/13/distant-shore/

> It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS.

This may change very soon :)

https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139

So, it only does three 32-bit iOS games thus far, BUT, there's a chance in the future, this emulator will allow us to run the game you're talking about: https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE

They're probably referring to dynarmic: https://github.com/merryhime/dynarmic

As an HLE, touchHLE is radically different from a low-level emulator (LLE) like QEMU. The only code the emulated CPU executes is the app binary and a handful of libraries; touchHLE takes the place of iPhone OS and provides its own implementations of the system frameworks (Foundation, UIKit, OpenGL ES, OpenAL, etc).

https://github.com/merryhime/dynarmic/pull/697 - Dynarmic implementing Arm backend support. Dynarmic is a dynamic recompiler for ARM.

I did some work on Dynarmic, so there's my bias I guess. But I def believe Dynarmic would emit better context-aware assembly than a CIL->Native jitteror the JVM would emit. Dynarmic takes advantage of instruction sets like BMI2 and AVX{2,512} and uses a pretty darn concise intermediate representation to the original ARM assembly to emit efficient x86 while a C# JIT probably still only emits baseline x86-64 and struggles with efficient vectorization of things like Arm's NEON instructions. Can't even imagine a C# or Java VM trying to automatically emit optimal assembly for an FMADD including handling NaN propagation or detecting that FMINNM can be very quickly emulated with a single vrangep{s,d} x86 instruction.

For emulators, it's currently used in dynarmic(Yuzu's ARM-to-x86 recompiler backend) for the fast emulation of ARM's NEON instruction set.