There is even active development on a Nintendo Switch emulator, which is just absolutely bonkers. If you jump into the r/EmulationOnAndroid subreddit, you’ll see tons of people using their smartphones to emulate many of the best consoles of all time. With this in mind, let’s pivot, for a moment, over to the Android world where mobile emulation is more prominent and popular. Along with it, Rosetta 2 provided on-device translation and compatibility for any applications that were not yet updated with support for the new architecture. Essentially this told everyone that what was to be known as the Apple M1 chip was actually based on the same architecture found in your iPhone and iPad. It was essentially a Mac Mini powered by Apple’s A12Z Bionic chipset, paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. If you think back to when Apple first announced it was beginning the transition away from Intel, the Apple Development Platform was unique. Instead, you just need to create an Apple Developer Account, then sideload the necessary apps before loading the appropriate ROMs. This is in large part due to the continued development of Delta, which doesn’t even require you to jailbreak your device. Technically, it’s been possible to emulate many of your favorite classic games on the iPhone and iPad for years.
But something that has started appearing more and more now that Apple’s platform of M1-powered Macs has been available for an extended length of time is emulation gaming. There are workarounds with the likes of cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass or NVIDIA GeForce Now, but native gaming is still pretty limited. We’ve covered it here at AppleToolBox quite a bit, but gaming on M1 Macs, and the macOS platform on the whole, just doesn’t match up to what’s possible with Windows.