In the last week, the iOS world has shifted. Retro game emulators have started launching and actually sticking around thanks to an Apple policy change.
The launch and subsequent success of the Delta emulator have led people to wonder whether the beloved GameCube and Wii emulator DolphiniOS (a popular fork of Dolphin) could make its way to Apple's mobile platform. Unfortunately, according to the app's developer (via 9To5Mac), it doesn't look like it will happen.
"Dolphin uses something called a Just-in-Time (JIT) recompiler to achieve this. Whenever the emulated console wants to run game code, Dolphin will use its JIT to translate the PowerPC code to ARM, and then execute the results," explained the developer.
At this point, without direct comment from Apple, it's hard to know why the company doesn't allow JIT. "It's possible that they consider it to be a security risk," said the DolphiniOS developer.
"While we could submit DolphiniOS to the App Store with just the interpreter, we would likely get endless complaints from users about the poor performance. App Review might also just reject us anyway because the app is unusable," said the developer to round out the blog post, killing the hopes of GameCube and Wii fans everywhere.
Another potential issue could come from Apple's requirement that the emulators on the App Store be considered retro. You could argue that the GameCube is a retro console, but saying the Wii, which came out in 2006, is retro would be a stretch.
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