Retro games and Apple devices are two of my main tech interests. A lot of people, including myself for the longest time, think that there is no way to emulate games if you use Apple devices unless you go through the frustrating process of loading AltStore/jailbreaking. However there are plenty of emulators that run via a web app that can be installed via safari. The essential iOS app thread inspired me to make this thread since these didn’t really fit the criteria of an “iOS app”. I’m going to list the sites and platforms that I use but please post your preferences in the comments.
Afterplay is my personal favorite. It can play SNES, GB/GBC/GBA on the free tier. NES, Genesis, and DS support is part of the premium tier ($6 a month). Whether you are on the free or paid tier, this is the only web emulator that I know of that has true save and ROM syncing between devices. Afterplay uses lib-retro cores as its backend and exposes a lot of different options that other web emulators don’t. A major con of this project is that it doesn’t have offline support at the moment but it has been announced as coming.
DS Player is a DS emulator that uses desmume-wasm as its emulator core. It allows you to connect to dropbox to sync saves. It features offline support but is a lot more barebones than afterplay’s ds core. Its totally free however
Emulator.JS is another project like after play in that it is a web frontend for a lot of js/wasm ports of lib-retro cores. It runs a multitude of systems including N64 and PS1 and it runs them at actually playable speed. However I can only seem to get it to work with touch controls on iOS. I don’t know if that is a problem with my controller (I use a razor Kishi 2) or with the emulator.js. It recognizes the controller just won’t rebind the controls no matter what I do.
[Eclipse](eclipse emu.me) is a web emulator with focus on NES, SNES, and GB/GBC/GBA. It allows you to connect to google drive and manage your library via the cloud. It also has offline support and is completely free.
Mods, I’m not involved with any of these projects so I’m I’m sorry if this breaks rules on advertising.
I’ll try to restate things in layman terms. People like being able to play games on their phone. But everyone hates playing games filled with ads. A lot of people love to play games from their childhood such as Pokémon and would love to do so on their phone instead playing of an ad supported game like “X the Y lite free version”
If you know about emulators on PC, you might search for them on the App Store and be disappointed that there are no emulators on the iOS AppStore. Some people might assume that you might just need an android or a jail broken phone but that’s not true.
You can go to afterplay.io or one of the other websites in my post, add the website to your Home Screen. And then play retro games sourced from your own collection (or from the web, I’m not a cop).
To play a game you need a digital copy of it called a ROM, these platforms then access these ROMs to run the game as it would have ran on its original system on your device using touch screen controls or controllers connected via lightning port or Bluetooth.
Afterplay is great in that it will automatically sync your ROMs and saves to any device you access it from so you can play your Pokémon game on your phone while on the bud and then when you get home you can continue that same game on your iPad, PC, or Xbox console.
I hope this helps, I’m a network engineer so I’m not very good at keeping the tech jargon to a minimum.