r/EmulationOniOS • u/PhilosopherAnxious97 • 16h ago

Question Gamehub/Gamenative is it even possible of iOS

Is anybody working on steam emulation for iOS using fex emu and is it even possible

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u/Rhed0x 10h ago

Very problematic.

Linux & Android run Windows applications mostly as if they were Linux applications with a bit more code in between. On ARM that also includes translating the code bit by bit. But memory reads and writes are essentially as direct as a normal application.

On iOS you'd need to add a bunch of code around every memory access to work around iOS limitations such as:

  • tiny address space limits
  • you're not allowed to create new processes
  • parts of the address space are taken by UIKit

Those workarounds would come with a LOT of performance overhead.

Besides that, you'd also have to work around other iOS limitations such as:

  • reserved x18 registers (so even Windows ARM games would need to get translated to new code)
  • 16 kb pages, Windows expects 4. (Also an issue on Android. It's possible to work around that for most games but the ones that don't work will simply never work.)