Want a way to emulate old Apple iOS apps and games? Well, touchHLE just had its first release to prevent some more things being lost to time.
Platforms change and move on, often cutting off what came before. We've seen it time and time again with games consoles and with iOS being the closed platform it is plenty will get lost from it too. Perhaps not so much now if projects like touchHLE can keep advancing.
touchHLE is a high-level emulator (HLE) for iPhone OS apps. It runs on modern desktop operating systems, and is written in Rust.
As an HLE, touchHLE is radically different from a low-level emulator (LLE) like QEMU. The only code the emulated CPU executes is the app binary and a handful of libraries; touchHLE takes the place of iPhone OS and provides its own implementations of the system frameworks (Foundation, UIKit, OpenGL ES, OpenAL, etc).
Currently it doesn't seem to have fully working Linux support, and it has been a solo effort so far but now it has a release up and it's available on GitHub I'm sure it won't be long until someone else hacks away at it to get Linux support into shape.
Right now their main goal for the project is to support the earlier days of iOS like iPhone OS 2.x and mainly later 32bit versions with modern 64bit apps a non-goal and unlikely to be prioritised due to the complexity of it.
You can see their example video below:
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