Experimental PR aims to add iOS support for Dolphin Emulator

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Dolphin is already able to dive into several platforms, however, one recent development could make it able to reach other previously foreign waters! A new pull request has appeared on the well-known Gamecube and Wii emulator's official GitHub repo that aims to add support for devices running Apple's own iOS operating system. This version of the emulator is currently only a draft and is not yet ready for general users but, as you can see from the video above, it can already run on some actual devices and boot several commercial games with varying levels of performance. The video was recorded on an iPhone X and 6th gen iPad by the PR's author (OatmealDome) and Simonx22.

A few other screenshots of Dolphin running on iOS can also be seen below:

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This port can reportedly work on 64-bit devices with a JIT recompiler using iOS 12 or above. Phones, tablets and iPods with an A9 SoC (or above) should be supported and the emulator has also been successfully tested on A10 and A11 cores. Still, as it usually is with anything experimental, there are a few caveats: the build is still a work in progress and it may take a good amount of effort before it's able to be merged into the official codebase - and that is assuming the dev team actually wants to support iOS at all. In addition, your device needs to be jailbroken in order to run Dolphin and this is not likely to change for a hypothetical official release either, as the app needs to overcome an arbitrary restriction put by Apple into the OS in order to work (it requires an address space larger than what's normally allowed), making it very unlikely to ever be approved for the App Store. There are also a few other known issues and technical limitations, however, the build's capabilities are still to be commended, especially considering its early stage of development.

As hinted before, the PR can be compiled successfully using a Mac, Xcode and cmake, so, if you're curious (and daring!) enough, you can find a link to OatmealDome's PR below. On the other hand, if you do not like messing around with toolchains and experimental code, it may be best to wait and hope that the Dolphin team accepts this pull request, thus making it official!

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