So, I've been a forum lurker now for a few years, using Dolphin since version 2.0, and love how far this emulator has come.
With today's unveiling of the iPhone 5S with the x64 A7 chip inside, it now supports OpenGL ES 3.0. Would it be possible to port the Android Dolphin over to iOS7 sometime in the future should a jailbreak ever come out for iOS7?
Probably, but anyway I don´t think so. The devs are pretty concentrated in two things (I.M.O.):
1-Finish the 3.5 era and make final fixes for 4.0 to be launched.
2-Take the Android emu version at least to 1.0 (finish the alpha-beta development period).
I'm not going to do it, that's for sure.
To get an application running on iOS, you need to pay Apple certain fees, and get them to approve it. Apple won't approve Dolphin because:
- It requires a dump of a game, or, if you're a larger proportion of our universe, a pirated disk image. Apple are likely to take a Nintendo-like stance, and say that because it's possible for pirates to use, the whole userbase is pirates, and therefore allowing it is supporting piracy.
- Because Apple have to approve everything, Nintendo could sue them for approving a piracy-assisting app.
- Apple ban any apps from containing self-modifying code or dynamically generated code. This is a problem because that's exactly how an emulator works.
Additionally, someone would have to want to do it. This would take at least as much work as the android port, if not more, as Apple don't allow betas and alphas on the app store, so anyone who wanted to test dolphin on their iOS device would have to pay a fee to apple for the iOS development kit.
Finally, to develop for the iPhone 5S, we'll need a developer to have the iPhone 5S, a Mac (or hackintosh) and knowledge of ObjectiveC, a language that no-one really knows unless they already work as an iOS app developer.
Of course, if the app only supported jailbroken devices, most of these restrictions would be lifted, but, unless something has changed, you can dual-boot a jailbroken iOS device into Android, and run Dolphin that way.
I know about the developer hindrance to the App Store, which is why I said jailbreak. And since the iPhone 5S isn't even out yet, and there's no jailbreak even possible yet, there is still a lot that would have to happen before this is even a pipe dream.
I work a bit with C++ for college, and I know of the barriers between Android and iOS, but I was thinking about way in the future if the code could be ported run in XCode in a similar way to how PPSSPP was ported from Android to iOS.
Also, the only iPhones that currently run Android are the 3G and below. And they don't have anything close to required hardware.
If one pays the $100/year fee to be a iOS developer, you can easily get Dolphin actually running on an iOS device. They have no restrictions on actually getting executable memory space until you push it to the app store.
At least this was the case back when I was doing development on my 3GS.
So... I guess I might be the one ruining the party for everyone: What about license issues with releasing GPL software on the Apple Store?
I thought the points was it couldn't be done anyway? XD
Yes, I wanted to destroy the minimal glance of hope that Sonicadvance1 had opened up though. I.e. even if people paid money for a dev license I'm not sure if the ios sdk would be compatible with the GPL.