Last week, the Delta emulation suite was launched on the App Store, which allows for easy emulation of classic Nintendo games on iOS up to the Nintendo 64 era without the need for jailbreaking. However, certain technical restrictions imposed by Apple are making it difficult for a functional emulator for later Nintendo home consoles to appear on iOS.
DolphiniOS, a fork of the popular Dolphin emulator for Nintendo Wii and GameCube games, confirmed a few days ago that it will not be available on the App Store despite emulators being allowed. The reason behind this decision is that Apple does not allow DolphiniOS to use its underlying performance enhancement technology.
According to its developer, OatmealDome, DolphiniOS uses a compilation called Just-in-Time (JIT), which “translates” the PowerPC-based code of GameCube and Wii to a language that other devices can understand, making the emulations work more efficiently.
OatmealDome writes that, although there is a way to avoid JIT using an “interpreter”, it is “many times slower than the JIT compiler“. In two videos shared by OatmealDome, you can see how poorly a Mario Kart Wii emulation works on an iPhone 15 when an interpreter is used instead of JIT.
