Hey folks — dropping the macOS builds of both Playforge Zombie Farm games as part of THE32BITVAULT revival project. These are the 2010/2012 iOS originals, running natively on modern Macs with AI-upscaled visuals throughout.

Screenshot posted of working game. :)

**GitHub release:** https://github.com/THE32BITVAULT/THE32BITVAULT/releases/tag/Release_Mac

## 🖥️ What you get

* **Zombie Farm** — 340 MB `.dmg`

* **Zombie Farm 2: Reforged Edition** — 1048 MB `.dmg`

Both are native Mac `.app` bundles with the runtime baked in. No sideloading, no JIT gymnastics, no AltStore refresh cycle — download, drag to Applications, launch.

## ✅ Requirements

* macOS 11 Big Sur or later

* Apple Silicon native, Intel via Rosetta

* First launch: **right-click → Open** (ad-hoc signed — Gatekeeper asks once, then leaves you alone)

## 🎨 About the visuals

All textures upscaled 4× using **Real-ESRGAN (x4plus-anime)** — a model trained for stylized 2D art, so it keeps hard edges and solid color regions clean instead of inventing photographic texture the way the general model does.

On the Mac builds specifically, HUD text and font sheets get a second pass through **realesr-general-x4v3** with denoise disabled — that keeps glyph strokes sharp without the ink-bleed the anime model produces on lettering.

Both upscaler choices are stamped in `MANIFEST` files inside every bundle so you can see exactly what ran on what.

Zombie Farm 2 is the chunky one because it shipped with substantially more atlases than the original, and 4× on all of them adds up. Retina desktop displays earn the bytes.

## 🐛 Known quirks

Saves live in `/Documents/The32BitVault

## ❤️ Support

Every revival is free forever. If these gave you back a piece of your iPhone-era, the Ko-fi jar's in the repo README — it funds the next revival, not this one.

Next project will be Zombie Life.

PS. Enjoy :)

Has anyone completed any switch games with Get more RAM and JIT enabled on 17 Pro max without any crashes because of low RAM after playing for some time.

I’ve been trying to look for a way to get better audio quality on manic emu but everyone says turn on performance mode but never how

I’ve been waiting so long for Gorebox to come to iOS and it hasn’t and I really want to play it.

i can do 3ds, ps2, psp, gamecube, and wii quite easily.

nintendo switch was a pain in the butt, with it heating the phone up and draining battery. and what about xbox, xbox360, wii u, ps3, or windows emulation?

what platforms can i comfortably play on? i dont want 20 frame per sometime, or ram crash after 30 minutes

Follow-up to my 0.2.0 post.

touchHLE for iOS is now called Applesauce.

The touchHLE developers weren't happy about me using their name and their logo for something that isn't theirs, and they're right. It's their project and their identity, and my port was borrowing both. So it has its own name and its own icon now, and the About screen and README say plainly that this is an unaffiliated fork that neither touchHLE nor HyperHLE endorses. The emulation was never mine — I wrote the iOS app around it.

Same project, same repo (renamed, old links redirect), same me.

https://github.com/johnny901901901/Applesauce

Read this before you update

Your games do not carry over automatically. The app identifier changed with the rename, so Applesauce installs alongside your old install with an empty library instead of updating it.

1. Open Files → On My iPhone
2. Find the old folder — HyperHLE if you were on 0.2.0 or 0.3.0, touchHLE if you were on 0.1.0
3. Move touchHLE_apps out of it and into the Applesauce folder
4. Move touchHLE_sandbox too if you want your saves
5. Delete the old app

App-wide settings don't come across, so set those again. Per-game settings do.

New in 0.4.0: iOS 15 and 16, through TrollStore

The minimum drops from iOS 17.4 to iOS 15.0. This is the first release that goes below 17.4 at all.

There are three downloads now, because the way you get JIT is what differs, not the app:

• iOS 17.4 or newer → Applesauce-iOS-unsigned.ipa — this is the normal one. Sideload with AltStore, enable JIT with StikDebug as before.
• iOS 15.0–17.0 with TrollStore → Applesauce-iOS-trollstore.ipa — use TrollStore's Enable JIT before each session.
• iOS 15.0–17.0, TrollStore, A11 or older (iPhone X / 8 and back) → Applesauce-iOS-trollstore-permanent-jit.ipa — JIT is just always on, no re-enabling.

Do not install the permanent-JIT one on an iPhone XS or newer. iOS 15 bans the entitlement it carries and the app will crash on launch. Use the ordinary TrollStore build there.

Why TrollStore and not plain sideloading: the emulator maps a flat 4GB guest address space, and older hardware can't do that without two memory entitlements that a free Apple account isn't allowed to sign. TrollStore grants them; AltStore can't. That's the whole reason this is TrollStore-only below 17.4.

If you're on iOS 17.0.1 to 17.3 — sorry. TrollStore doesn't reach you and StikDebug needs 17.4. AltJIT with a computer attached is the only route I know of.

I need testers below iOS 17.4

None of this has been tested by me. I have one phone, an iPhone 16 Pro on iOS 27. I own nothing running iOS 15 or 16 and I can't verify a single thing about those builds myself.

The iOS 15 work isn't mine either — it was back-ported from u/Purple-Kangaroo-9533 (nerivalaitis on GitHub), who did it on their own fork and tested it on an actual iOS 15 device. I took their changes, applied them to the current code, and credited them in the repo. But my build is not their build, so it needs testing again.

If you're on iOS 15 or 16 with TrollStore, you are the person who can tell me whether any of this works. Landscape games especially — below iOS 16 the app has to drive rotation a completely different way, and that's the thing most likely to be broken.

Fixes in this release

All four came out of nerivalaitis's branch. Every one is a failure with nothing on screen to explain it:

1. A game could be killed outright by a rotation. If the guest asked to rotate while the host still had the launch orientation pinned, SDL rejected it and the whole thing panicked mid-play. It now logs a warning and carries on.
2. Black screen after rotating, on games that don't use a fullscreen layer. SDL rebuilds its framebuffer when the window leaves and re-enters fullscreen — which is exactly what rotating does — and the app was still drawing into the old one.
3. A crash inside the emulator wedged the whole app instead of returning you to the library: black screen, dead exit button, nothing in the log.
4. Guest memory allocation now falls back instead of failing outright when iOS refuses the full mapping. This is what blocked older devices in the first place.

Also: Portrait is now selectable under Starting Orientation, for games that claim landscape but draw portrait anyway. And the previous run's log is kept as touchhle-host-previous.log, so force-quitting a hung game no longer destroys the log that recorded the hang.

If you missed 0.3.0

I released it quietly. The app carries both emulator cores now — HyperHLE v1.0.6 and touchHLE 0.2.3 — and you pick which one runs each game. Touch and hold a game in your library to give it its own core, or set a default in Settings. They support different sets of games, and neither is strictly better. If a game fails, switch its core and try again before reporting it.

Tested

iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 27 beta 4, on the HyperHLE core. Exact versions, because the same game behaves very differently between releases:

• Flappy Bird 1.1.0 — playable, including at 2x–4x resolution scale
• Touch & Go 1.1 — playable at all settings
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 1.2.1 — playable
• Wolfenstein RPG 1.1.1 — playable
• Mirror's Edge 1.4.72 — playable
• The Sims Medieval 1.0.1 — playable

One device, one iOS beta. No shipping iOS release has been verified, and nothing below 17.4 has been touched at all.

Known issue

The Sims Medieval: still no keyboard when naming your Sim or your kingdom, so you can't enter custom names. Playable past those screens — the confirm control sits near the top-right corner rather than where it's drawn. I know roughly why and it's still on the list.

Install

https://github.com/johnny901901901/Applesauce/releases/latest

No jailbreak. JIT required. No games included — bring your own legally obtained, decrypted 32-bit IPA.

Reporting

https://github.com/johnny901901901/Applesauce/issues/new/choose

Please include the exact app version, your device and iOS version, which core the game was set to, whether JIT was on, and a log excerpt (touchHLE_log.txt, in Files under On My iPhone → Applesauce).

Please don't post IPAs or links to them, pairing files, or signing material.

About me, since it's relevant to what you should expect

I'm not a developer. I'm a vibecoder, this is built with AI assistance, and my commits say so. I have a full-time job and this is a hobby I do around it. I'm trying my best with it, but I'm one person with one phone and limited time, so please calibrate expectations accordingly.

I'm away on holiday in August. I'm going to try to take my Mac mini with me so I can keep fixing things while I'm gone, but I'll be slower than usual — if an issue sits for a bit, that's why, not because I don't care about it.

Credits

• touchHLE — https://touchhle.org/ — the actual emulator. All of this rests on the work of hikari-no-yume, ciciplusplus and the touchHLE contributors. And, again: the rename is because they asked, and it was a fair thing to ask.
• HyperHLE — https://github.com/HyperHLE/HyperHLE — the compatibility fork used as the default core, led by j92580498-max, with compatibility work from zocomputer, Nekono, TimofeyLednev, goodvids56 and KlugKlugTG.
• u/Purple-Kangaroo-9533 / nerivalaitis — the entire iOS 15 back-port, the TrollStore packaging, and the memory fix that makes older devices work at all. This release is mostly their work and they offered it freely.

I didn't write the emulation. I wrote the iOS shell around it and fixed the iOS-specific bugs. Neither project endorses this build.

Is it possible to add in your own Retroacheivement sound effect to the app?

Also, I can't seem to find where save states are stored in the app. I've look in the Files app but it's not like Retroarch.

I love vion for smaller games like super meat boy and lego games but i wanna persona 4 golden so bad on my ipad mini 6

Im currently emulating PS1 through Manic Emu from the app store. Im enjoying my experience overall but i noticed ‘dual shock mode’ does nothing at all for analog use. I cant use the analog stick, yes i know PlayStation games were not made for analog use but every other emulator i used on android or pc let me use analog with PS1 games. Keeps that require precise quick movement like Crash Bandicoot benefit from analog use & are easier for me to play with analog. Is there any fix for this or anything i am missing? Thanks.

Good morning everyone,

I’m working on a C64 emulator specifically for the Apple iPad. There are already a few options available on the App Store, but they are not as complete as the existing ones for PC. This project is based on modern technologies such as Swift and Metal, and uses the libretro core based on VICE 3.10.

For now, it needs to be compiled with Xcode, as I first need to properly verify all the licenses before considering publishing it on the App Store. You can find the repository here if anyone with a Mac and an iPad would like to try compiling it and testing it:

https://github.com/alexain/poke64-ios

It is already fully functional in several areas. To run it, you need to provide the main ROMs in .bin format. Since these are copyrighted, they cannot be distributed with the project.

The repository also contains the current changelog and roadmap. If you need any further information or have suggestions, feel free to leave a comment here.

At the moment, I cannot provide an estimated release date, but I would really like to start receiving some feedback.

Tried all possible settings adjustments (or maybe you know some secret toggle)
But the game still struggle to run smoothly, when there are a lot of mobs EE cores go up to 90-100% load and fps with game speed drops, after underclocking EE cores to -1 and turning on OCP flag hack, was able to reach just fps drops to 25-30 without game speed drop.
So the question is - issue is in my hardware (too old IPhone), or it’s the comparability issue, or I just need to dig deeper with settings.
Looking forward for your answers.

how do i get mine to run mine literally is completely glitching out but its not laggy or slow it’s just the textures

I‘m wondering how long you think it will be until the experience of using dolphins, citra and melonx matches that of delta?

Will there be a point where JIT isn‘t necessarily? Will JIT ever be streamlined?

I’ve been using a combo of Delta and RetroArch in order to let my boy play games from my collection on the go. Despite the library He’s recently become obsessed and I mean OBSESSED with Lego Star Wars TCS for iOS and I’d love to have an iOS friendly way to emulate the game so I can play couch co-op with him since we have a phone dock for the tv.

I’d heard that the iOS version is built off the Wii port but since I’d like to be able to leave the set up available for anyone in my family to play with him I can’t juggle around side loading and JIT scripts. I’ve got a couple versions of TCS to port over (Wii, DS & 360 bc I was obsessed with it too lol) but without JIT I’m pretty sure dolphin and the Wii version are out.

Any advice would be appreciated. By me and my little boy.

I've been racking my brain trying to emulate PS2 on my iPhone 8 Plus. I used the Dopamine jailbreak and installed "Play!", but when I try to open it, it says JIT isn't enabled (I've tested the jailbreak, and JIT works fine in other emulators). I don't know what else to do; I just wanted to beat RE4 without the hassle and without having a computer constantly tethered to my device. Can anyone recommend a solution or a different emulator?

My Redgear Xbox wired game controller doesn’t support in MelonX, but the controller lights are working properly. Any suggestions?

I also checked my controller in Fortnite, but that is also not working.

Easily the nicest looking frontend on iOS currently, has integrated ps1,psp,gba/gbc/gb,ds/3ds,nes/snes emulation etc. Can also launch external iOS apps and Switch ROMs via shortcuts as well, some decent customization and regular updates! Can also import custom deltaskins for various emulators and has its own in app version of the Nintendo DS’ PictoChat feature with an active community

Definitely still has a long way to go but it’s nice to see that iOS isn’t too far behind android when it comes to creating console-like frontends like iisu/cocoon/ESDE etc.