Limiting policies App store This meant that emulators for iOS and tvOS were impossible to get, or at least it was if we were limited to the official channels. Fortunately, Apple has recently fixed this and made it possible RetroArch has officially appeared for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

RetroArch, without being something unique in its segment, is a bit of an odd software within emulation, as it is not really an emulator, but can be defined as framework that allows you to emulate a wide variety of platforms, including NES, Super Nintendo, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, Game Boy, Mega Drive, MAME, Game Boy Advance, Dreamcast, etc.. It relies on kernels to perform its function, which are actually scaled down versions or engines of available emulators, both proprietary and open source. For example, for the Super Nintendo there is Snes9x (private) and several bsnes (free software) compilations, while for the PlayStation there are PCSX ReARMed and DuckStation.

The advantage of RetroArch is that it allows you to emulate a large number of platforms using a single interface, but this comes at the cost of making the framework somewhat difficult to use as the user may have fewer options compared to using an official emulator. applications. However, and in the case of emulating a large number of platforms without diving into the configuration of each engine, this is a solution that comes in handy, especially if you want to avoid installing a large number of applications for emulation tasks.

RetroArch is a bit more technical, but without going too deep, it’s perhaps the best-known implementation of the Libretro library, which is aimed at making game and emulator creation easier. In other words, RetroArch is basically a Libretro interface that allows you to run a large number of emulators from different platforms. This is one of the most popular applications of its style and is not uncommon to see it used in machine oriented retrogaming.

There is no mystery here. iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV users simply head to the RetroArch App Store page and grab the app. In addition to supporting multi-platform emulation, it is open source, free, ad-free, and does not collect user data. When you see how the mobile app sector works, especially on Android, something like RetroArch has to be appreciated.

The iOS version of RetroArch is fully touch-friendly, just like the Android version, and supports video game drivers for those who don’t want to deal with the touch controls that these types of apps provide, which are difficult to use mainly due to the lack of tactile feedback.

It’s important to note that while Apple has relaxed its hand when it comes to the presence of emulators in the App Store, its policy is still clearly more restrictive than Android, not to mention the desktop systems it supports (Windows and macOS) and those that have the law as the only clear limit during operation (Linux distribution). By this we mean that maybe not all the kernels that RetroArch makes available for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android are present for the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV versions.

If you want to get an idea of ​​how to use RetroArch at least in its most basic parts, we invite you to take a look at our tutorials for Windows, Android and Linux.

The cover image was created by artificial intelligence.