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Huge news for retrogaming fans today who can now pretty much carry their collections around in their own pockets.
Long-standing retro front-end Retroarch has gone live on the Apple App Store and can be installed for free now, opening the possibility of playing thousands of games from yesteryear.
Fancy a bit of Castle of Illusion on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis while you wait for the bus. No probs. Super Nintendo Mario Kart? Okie dokie. And you can go on forever. Even more obscure cores such as the Amstrad CPC (a British 8-bit computer that happened to be my first proper computer) are catered for.
Of course, you will need the games as well, which you can store in the appropriate folder in the Files app on your phone. Then all you have to do is browse to it and load it. Retroarch iOS will then suggest the appropriate core and from there, you are instantly in the game.
Goodbye wife, it’s been nice knowing you
Some games work better than others. I was excited to try the Amstrad and it was no big deal, but the Amstrad was a computer with a keyboard so I was faced with a keyboard input choice of Press 1 to start, etc.
Fortunately, Retroarch has a virtual keyboard you can bring up and use, so it was no big deal really, you just have to realize the limitations.
No such problems of course if you are playing on Nintendo or Sega cores as the on-screen joypad deals with all that.
We will we be doing some guides to get you through the process in the near future.
Also on the App Store on a very good day for Emulation is the amazing PSPSPP app which you should also pick up for free that emulates PSP games to near perfection. Remember when you thought your PSP games looked amazing on its screen – try them on an iPhone’s OLED?
Emulating old hardware on iOS has been a long time coming and has definitely been worth the wait.
Featured Image: Ai-generated in Ideogram
