7
votes
Playport: Run Windows games on a stock, non-jailbroken iPhone
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- Title
- GitHub - playportdev/playport: Playport runs Windows games, 64-bit and now 32-bit, on a stock, non-jailbroken iPhone. Install a game from your library onto the phone, pick up a controller and press Play. The game runs on the phone's own CPU and GPU: no PC, no cloud, no stream.
- Word count
- 1767 words
I'm gonna go try this out. Gimme an hour or so. I have an iPhone 15 Pro, so I can't imagine this running... gosh, what's a game in my library that should be reasonable? Something not too old but also not too demanding? I'm gonna go with... Manifold Garden for now. I'll see you on the other side.
Edit: I have a paid developer account, so sideloading the app was more or less painless once I set the Increased Memory flag in App Store Connect. Then it was a matter of opening the app, pairing to the developer mode menu in the Settings app, installing LocalDevVPN (iOS sideloaders will know this step well), and logging in to steam. The UI is super polished, it even supports Steam Cloud Saves (that's insane, right?)
Unfortunately not all games work. In fact, most I tried - even smaller games like Balatro - didn't even attempt to load. This has been my experience with the majority of games I tried (Deus Ex, 20 Small Mazes, Anode Heart, Balatro , even Half-Life 1 and so on). But man, when it does work, like in BioShock, it rips, at 60fps, on my iPhone screen, and it really makes you wonder why Apple is not doing this themselves and instead choose to hold the platform back.
(Bump to get this back up after my edits)
It seems like this project mainly is just using the code of https://github.com/willfaust/madeira
https://github.com/playportdev/playport/blob/main/docs/decisions/0001-superproject-on-madeira.md
It’s one of the explicit instructions for Claude.
Not that madeira isn’t also using AI, but it has way more eyes on it, a lot more users, etc so I don’t really see any compelling reasons to use this over it. More users will mean more support, and if it is doing anything malicious, a higher likelihood someone finds out about it.
http://playport.dev/
Posting is not an endorsement on this one, as the webpage looks very spit out by an AI, lot of automated looking commits and the issue page isn't being tended to, but between the recompilation boom, and Steam FEX/Proton, we're starting to get a lot closer to the write once, run anywhere dream. Not sure if it's a good thing...
Related is a similar project for Mac Gaming, at this point I'd wonder if you could go the other way use Crossover for FEX on iOS.
https://mapc.games/