touchMORE

A High-Level Emulator for early iPhone OS Apps.

Introduction

touchMORE is a community-driven fork of touchHLE, focusing on preserving and running apps originally designed for iPhone OS 2.x and 3.x. Unlike traditional emulators that simulate hardware (LLE), touchMORE uses High-Level Emulation (HLE) to reimplement the system frameworks directly.

This approach allows for native performance, better integration with modern operating systems, and the ability to run apps without requiring original Apple firmware or BIOS files.

Technical Architecture

The core of touchMORE is written in Rust for safety and performance. It provides its own clean-room implementations of:

Foundation & UIKit: Managing the app lifecycle, view hierarchies, and touch events.
OpenGLES: Translating mobile graphics commands to modern desktop OpenGL or Vulkan.
OpenAL: Native spatial audio support.
Mach-O Loader: Parsing and executing original iPhone binaries.

Note: We are currently working on 64-bit iOS support to allow later versions of apps to run on modern AArch64 hardware.

Supported Platforms

touchMORE is cross-platform by design:

Windows: Runs as a native .exe using SDL2.
macOS: Native support for Intel and Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3).
Android: Optimized for AArch64 devices with support for touch controls.

Setup Guide

1. Prepare your Apps

You must provide your own apps. touchMORE supports .ipa files and .app bundles. These must be decrypted binaries.

2. Installation

On desktop, extract the release zip and place your apps in the touchHLE_apps folder. On launch, touchMORE will automatically scan this folder and present an app picker.

3. Input Mapping

Touch gestures are mapped to the mouse (left-click). Accelerometer-based games can often be controlled using a gamepad or the arrow keys, depending on the title.

Android Usage

The Android version requires Scoped Storage permissions. For the emulator to see your games, move them to the internal storage at the following path:

/sdcard/Android/data/org.touchhle.android/files/touchHLE_apps

If the folder does not exist, launch the app once to let it generate the directory structure.

Graphics & Sound

touchMORE requires a GPU that supports OpenGL 3.3 or higher. For mobile devices, OpenGL ES 3.0 is required. If you experience "Black Screen" issues, ensure your graphics drivers are up to date.

Audio is handled via OpenAL. If you have no sound, check that your default playback device is set correctly before launching the emulator.

Licensing & Legal

This project is an independent open-source effort. We are not affiliated with Apple Inc. iPhone, iOS, iPad, and iPod are trademarks of Apple Inc.

Source Code: Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0)
Binary Releases: GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL v3.0) or later.

Special thanks to the original touchHLE contributors and the Rust community.