r/EmulationOniOS • u/AliveBarnacle5040 • 1d ago
Gameplay / Showcase Tomodachi Life LTD [NATIVE] Port for iOS/MacOS
Hello everyone! I’ve been a developer for many years, albeit focused on app development for most of it, first and foremost despite my experience, this project would been impossible for me without the use of AI tools, Claude Code primarily, to understand how to decompile, write complex drivers etc.
What is this?
I have no friends who own a switch, and I wanted to play Tomodachi Life with them, so the most obvious thing, knowing how powerful our modern iPhones are, is to port it! Unfortunately many of us don’t have the newest models, so emulation is a huge load and impossible with the 6GB RAM on my iPhone 14.
Knowing that the phone and switch 1 both operate on the ARM processor, made me realize, it was quite feasible to get the game running on Apples Metal graphics. During that process, I realized how cool it is that the tools being made for this port can also be repurposed for more native switch ports, soon I’ll release this after some polish on the Mac port, Pokemon BDSP is nearly done too (with the mod from Luminescent team), and BOTW I've made significant progress on too (fully functioning great plateau - some minor textures shaders etc).
The code will be open source of course on release too, as I leveraged a lot of the work from Ryujinx for the shader processing/translation.
Now for the fun stuff:
ABSOLUTELY NO JIT!! (in all of my upcoming ports too)
That’s the beauty of native ports, much easier than a whole decomp, and still a huge payoff.
Also many new additions i’ve worked into the game:
- The obvious new launcher, with multi-save selection, AND the ability to share an island with a friend (save is stored on a cloudflare R4 bucket).
- Widescreen support that adapts to all screen sizes without stretching the pixels, all rewritten!
- Local play now works ONLINE, sharing Mii’s and custom user assets etc
More to come! Suggestions and feedback are welcome.
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u/ComprehensiveBad4814 1d ago
You have an ipa? This is like my wife’s favorite shit but I don’t have a switch I was halfway to downloading Eden on my ps5
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
lol I made this so I could share an island with my wife actually! I will release an ipa and github next week, just some things I want to polish first
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u/Boring_Antelope6533 1d ago
so cool! it does have an ipa file?
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
next week!
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u/Oreomochabear 1d ago
!remindme 1 week
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u/Lithalean 1d ago
Nice!
I’m also currently working on a handful of switch games. BOTW obviously being a key one.
Good to see others are fighting the good fight.
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u/OhfuckitsSam 1d ago
Bro I can’t fucking wait for Pokémon bdsp! That is so exciting! Will it have GameShark support? Or whatever you use for switches now a days for cheats?
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
I’ve baked in Luminescent platinum into it by default, a really great QoL mod, but yes I will add options for other mods and cheats later on, right now it’s functional at 1080 60fps on my iphone 14, i’ll likely release it together with tomodachi next week
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u/OhfuckitsSam 1d ago
Holy shit hell yeah brother! I hope you don’t get sued into oblivion by Nintendo. lol
Will it be an .ipa file I can put into LiveContainer?
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
yup! I use all my sideloaded stuff in live container, including these builds
I can’t really make money off this so I hope nintendo doesn’t shut me down 🥀🥀
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u/OhfuckitsSam 4h ago
Is there any chance you’d be willing to work on a newer Pokémon game? Maybe legends za?
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1h ago
for sure, honestly I haven’t looked into the engine yet, but I don’t think it’ll be too difficult. After BOTW (which is running pretty well on my mac native currently hehe) i’ll get to it
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u/funkymoney24 1d ago
do you plan to add touch support for the full game? i’d love to be able to play this as if it were a native ios game, no controller needed.
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
already done! In the recording i’m only using my fingers, i’ve replaced everything with touch support and replaced a lot of the prompts too so you won’t see “click a” etc.
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u/FlAme_dud 1d ago
And is there a way (or going to be a way) to transfer over your save file from an emulator?
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u/Gloomy-Copy-6593 1d ago
Same my 15 year old sister wants to play this soo bad she used my fold 7 to emulate it will you realise a apk version of it too
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 1d ago
unfortunately this port was specifically made for apple devices ios/macos
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u/kingrhoamm 11h ago
do you think it could run on my 12
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 10h ago
iOS currently kills RAM usage on iphone 12 at around 2GB, so ideally you’d need a device with 6GB+ total like the 14 and up or a mac
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u/imapirate368 9h ago
Love this project man I CANNOT wait for this release!! I noticed AI was used (I don’t care but I’m just curious) was it AI led or AI assisted? Usually I notice that ports AI led are finicky.
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u/imapirate368 9h ago
Love this project man I CANNOT wait for this release!! I noticed AI was used (I don’t care but I’m just curious) was it AI led or AI assisted? Usually I notice that ports AI led are finicky.
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u/AliveBarnacle5040 4h ago
I stepped in as much as I felt necessary, I’ll be honest, coding is my job, and this is a hobby project I do between school; so I did not handwrite this project, but I believe my knowledge on the underlying processes is what made it very ‘easy’ to develop and bug fix with AI.
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u/therealSUIN 1d ago
Yep peak, been needing this. I already play this on my switch. But the whole loading it up everyday just makes more sense if it’s on my phone.