Retro game emulators on iOS that dont require jailbreak

Retro games and Apple devices are two of my main tech interests. A lot of people, including myself for the longest time, think that there is no way to emulate games if you use Apple devices unless you go through the frustrating process of loading AltStore/jailbreaking. However there are plenty of emulators that run via a web app that can be installed via safari. The essential iOS app thread inspired me to make this thread since these didn’t really fit the criteria of an “iOS app”. I’m going to list the sites and platforms that I use but please post your preferences in the comments.

Afterplay is my personal favorite. It can play SNES, GB/GBC/GBA on the free tier. NES, Genesis, and DS support is part of the premium tier ($6 a month). Whether you are on the free or paid tier, this is the only web emulator that I know of that has true save and ROM syncing between devices. Afterplay uses lib-retro cores as its backend and exposes a lot of different options that other web emulators don’t. A major con of this project is that it doesn’t have offline support at the moment but it has been announced as coming.

DS Player is a DS emulator that uses desmume-wasm as its emulator core. It allows you to connect to dropbox to sync saves. It features offline support but is a lot more barebones than afterplay’s ds core. Its totally free however

Emulator.JS is another project like after play in that it is a web frontend for a lot of js/wasm ports of lib-retro cores. It runs a multitude of systems including N64 and PS1 and it runs them at actually playable speed. However I can only seem to get it to work with touch controls on iOS. I don’t know if that is a problem with my controller (I use a razor Kishi 2) or with the emulator.js. It recognizes the controller just won’t rebind the controls no matter what I do.

[Eclipse](eclipse emu.me) is a web emulator with focus on NES, SNES, and GB/GBC/GBA. It allows you to connect to google drive and manage your library via the cloud. It also has offline support and is completely free.

Mods, I’m not involved with any of these projects so I’m I’m sorry if this breaks rules on advertising.

vapidness,

I’m the creator of Afterplay. I’m really glad it’s your personal favourite :) I’m currently working on offline support and hope to release it ASAP. If anyone has any questions I’m happy to answer them :)

lqdrchrd,
lqdrchrd avatar

Thank you for such an awesome app!

CGSaw,

Web rCade is also a great one. Takes a bit of setup but when I used it it worked great with a Backbone

TORFdot0, (edited )

WebRcade is a great example especially for folks already on Dropbox. There is a bit of a learning curve to its feeds but it’s very versatile in the amount of consoles it can emulate! I will update my post in a bit to add it to the list.

Edit: I actually can’t update posts via wefwef but this comment is high enough that it has good visibility

baggyspandex,

I’ve been using Provenance on my AppleTV and it works great. You do have to pay a yearly dev account fee in a somewhat bizarre and slightly shady way, but it’s an option if you’re looking for something compatible with tvOS as well.

bathrobe,
bathrobe avatar

@TORFdot0 can you please say all that again but for people who have no idea what you’re talking about, as opposed to people who already know and thus don’t need the advice.

TORFdot0,

I’ll try to restate things in layman terms. People like being able to play games on their phone. But everyone hates playing games filled with ads. A lot of people love to play games from their childhood such as Pokémon and would love to do so on their phone instead playing of an ad supported game like “X the Y lite free version”

If you know about emulators on PC, you might search for them on the App Store and be disappointed that there are no emulators on the iOS AppStore. Some people might assume that you might just need an android or a jail broken phone but that’s not true.

You can go to afterplay.io or one of the other websites in my post, add the website to your Home Screen. And then play retro games sourced from your own collection (or from the web, I’m not a cop).

To play a game you need a digital copy of it called a ROM, these platforms then access these ROMs to run the game as it would have ran on its original system on your device using touch screen controls or controllers connected via lightning port or Bluetooth.

Afterplay is great in that it will automatically sync your ROMs and saves to any device you access it from so you can play your Pokémon game on your phone while on the bud and then when you get home you can continue that same game on your iPad, PC, or Xbox console.

I hope this helps, I’m a network engineer so I’m not very good at keeping the tech jargon to a minimum.

bathrobe,
bathrobe avatar

@TORFdot0

That was extremely extremely helpful. Thank you. I had no idea this was talking about phone emulators. That’s amazing. I didn’t know you could do that!!!
Really really appreciate this

SuperSloth,
@SuperSloth@lemmy.world avatar

Amazing write-up! I immediately went to Afterplay and added it to my home screen! Now I just need to find a solid place to grab ROMs and I’ll be set! Thanks!

vapidness,

I hope you enjoy it and if you have any feedback just let me know :)

magmaus3,
@magmaus3@szmer.info avatar

Delta (available via altstore) also doesn't require a jailbreak

LazaroFilm,
@LazaroFilm@lemmy.world avatar

And for more advanced you can use SideStore with Ignited. They’re forks of AltStore and Delta respectively. SideStore allows to refresh app permission without a computer and Ignited has more options available.

magmaus3,
@magmaus3@szmer.info avatar

didn’t know about them, thanks :3

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