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Apple Approves First Retro PC Emulator for iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro
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Yes! But you might wanna check out ScummVM, that's what I use to play Space Quest
ScummVM :: Home
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical adventure and role-playing games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were...
www.scummvm.org
Strategic Conquest.
I wouldn't mind seeing Apple DOS and even ProDOS on it too. Castle Wolf. Wizardry.
They specifically said it wasn't worth fighting with App Review to get it approved because of the poor performance of the app without JIT. So it really does seem to just be a proof of concept.
It seems to run Windows XP, Windows 7 and several Linux distros fine enough. That’s useful for many people.
This just seems more like them wining about lack of JIT than anything else to me. If it was so useless, then how come they even bothered trying to submit it, and how come they took the time to replace JIT? I’ve heard that XP and 7 run fine, and various Linux distros as well. 10 and 11 do run, but are a bit slow from what I’ve heard. But running a bit slow doesn’t necessarily make it useless.
I believe so. You should be able to clone the GitRepo in Xcode and then sign it as yourself. Then you should be good for a year (Dev access) as opposed to a week.
It generally referrs to compilation
JIT isn't part of MacOS. Its a feature of QEMU, which UTM builds on.
Rosetta 2 is essentially a transpiler, but my understanding is that it does everything up front, rather than just-in-time.
Beyond that, UTM isn't using Rosetta 2 for emulating x86 systems, though I believe it supports the use of Rosetta 2 inside Linux VMs, which is a feature of MacOS.
It's not news that The Mac isn't (yet?) as locked down as iOS. Users can choose to let their Macs run any app, not just apps from the App store, not just signed and Sandboxed apps. MacOS apps can download and execute arbitrary native code. As such a JIT on MacOS doesn't add any risk.
FYI, increasing the # of cores exposed by the emulator and increasing the size of the JIT cache in UTM settings can make a huge difference in the performance of an emulated x86 VM. It's still going to be pretty damn slow, though.Windows 10 X64 is barely usable on my M3 Max MacbookPro - (my iPad Pro might actually run it a bit faster due to the M4)
Emulation with JIT isn't necessary to run a Linux distro, but virtualization support is. There are ARM versions of many popular linux distros. Unfortunately Apple removed virtualization support from iOS.
There are, however, UNIX userlands for iOS, like A-shell
As I can connect my iMac’s Magic Keyboard to my iPhone, can the keyboard work on the emulated Windows 7 in UTM SE?
This is the whole issue. Mac Mini m2 has virtualisation and runs windows 11 extremely well in UTM. It shocked me how well.
I have a few questions. When running on an Apple M series processor on iPadOS:
There's no virtualization restriction so it's not just emulation, right? So it's not pure emulation but hardware virtualization too?
Does running it on an iPad with the specs mentioned above, does it have JIT support (not sure what that is or how it affects performance).
I'm having a hard time completing the install. It's kind of complicated (for me). Any tips that would help? Also, any recommendations for the easiest, most secure way to download Windows 11 for Arm? I'd rather not go the Windows Insider Preview route.
Any advice and knowledge on the matter is appreciated.
Thanks!
iPad Pro m2 has had virtualisation blocked since ios15ish out of spite. That, and the lack of JIT, makes UTM SE dog slow, and there is no way to get JIT running stably currently on iOS17 (altjit and jitterbug are kind of broken)
Apple, just let us have virtualisation on a iPad Pro device, even if we are stuck with a Fisher Price OS.
My windows 7 UTM used to run pretty well on iPad Pro UTM when Altjit worked. I was even playing Sim City 3000 on it! Loading the same image on UTM SE and it’s been like 10 minutes and still booting.
Just let our iPad Pro be pro.
I was responding directly to the Windows 11 question. Also there is a difference between "good" and "fine enough".
given they took an effort to carve out the virtualization code in iPadOS, I fear it will not come back
and unfortunately the topic is too technical for the EU - so no help from that side to be expected
Question. How well do you think a game from like 2006 would run on UTM SE? I’ve heard that XP and Windows 7 run on ok on M-Series iPads, so I’m guessing it should run. I don’t have crazy high expectations for performance, but I am thinking I’ll test it out. Also, where can I find legit ISOs for Windows (XP, 7, 10, and 11)?
Windows 98 seems to run about as well as my first Celeron 400 PC.
Not entirely true. Newer MacOS versions have a stricter runtime environment, but JIT is still possible. Here's some literature from Apple's developer site.
An app needs a specific entitlement to use JIT, which Apple grants to Safari on iOS and derivatives.
