How to run old iPhone games on computer

The Swedish developer, known online as hikari-no-yume, has created a touchHLE emulator that allows you to run games that were created for ancient iPhones on a Windows or macOS computer. These games do not work on modern Apple devices.

Three games are currently supported: Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Super Monkey Ball and Touch & Go. They were released in 2008-2009 and were very popular then. There is no support for other games yet, but work in this direction is underway.

The emulator can run games that support iPhone OS 2.x. The developer plans to add support for iPhone OS 3.x and 4.x, and possibly iPhone OS 1.x. More recent versions are not a priority, but she’s thinking about an emulator for 32-bit apps and games that stopped running on iOS and iPadOS after the full transition to 64-bit architecture.

On GitHub Ready builds of touchHLE for macOS and Windows are posted, as well as the source code of the project. To start the game, you need to download the ipa-file (for example, from w3bsit3-dns.com) and drag it onto the program icon. Instead of touch control, a mouse or gamepad is used. Game saves are stored in a separate folder so that the progress made is not lost.