Will Nintendo Wii emulators appear on iPhone?

The official arrival of emulators on the App Store seems like an endless source of content for the nostalgic. You’ve been able to run Game Boy, GBA and other games for a few days now. retro consoles on iPhonea situation that opens the door to think and look at the platforms that Android has been emulating for some time. But what will happen to the Nintendo Wii?

Many users began to wonder The iPhone can run Nintendo GameCube, Wii or PlayStation 2 games.. But the reality is that the reaction of the developers was not long in coming.

The creator of Dolphin, one of the most famous Nintendo console emulators on the market, has made several statements revealing important details about emulation of more complex systems on iPhone. And, unfortunately, the news is not very good.

Nintendo Wii emulators will not appear on iPhone

The Dolphin team’s response is compelling and discouraging: “Our emulator will not be included in the iPhone App Store“And not because they don’t want to. The problem is that Apple prevents execution ‘during’ (JIT) on your devices.

It’s a process vital compilation so that the most demanding consoles can run well on iPhone. Dolphin wanted to show what an emulated GameCube game looks like on an iPhone without JIT. The result is, to put it mildly, disastrous.

And, as we can read in 9to5MacJIT is a compilation system that allows translate code created for PowerPC processors to ARM fast and very efficient. Without this method The emulator is not capable of providing decent performance and thus the hope of running Nintendo Wii and GameCube games on the iPhone is fading.

Apple refuses to allow JIT

Moreover, Apple has been open about this issue. Dolphin opened a case JIT support request to be able to continue working with your emulator, to which he received a refusal from Cupertino. There is little hope that this protocol can be used, so emulation systems for more advanced consoles They are excluded for now.

And JIT seems to be necessary to port almost any moderately demanding console emulator. The iPhone is powerful enough to run Nintendo Wii games. But When what you want to run is designed for completely different platforms, it takes more than just brute force.

Which consoles will iPhone users miss?

On the opposite side of the scale is Android, an operating system that… yes it allows you to use JIT and other code conversion protocols. This fact allows the Google ecosystem to perform emulators for an infinite number of consoles another.

Here are some examples of consoles that could be emulated on the iPhone if Apple allowed JIT:

• PlayStation 1
• PlayStation 2
• PSP
• Game cube
• Nintendo Wii
• Nintendo DS and 3DS
• Nintendo 64
• MegaDrive
• Dreamcast

Without Apple’s approval for support, the iPhone will have serious problems running games decently on those consoles, so developers may not even get started.