It just got easier to run GameCube, other emulators on iPhone, iPad

A recent video shows off how the ARM version of Windows 11 can run on an M2 iPad Air with the right software sideloaded onto the device. This also opens the door to emulating more modern consoles like the GameCube or even the Nintendo Switch.

The blogger who got Windows working says it runs decently well since he’s using a custom, slimmed-down version of Windows 11 called Tiny 11 that sheds a lot of bloatware. He’s shared a full video on the process if you want to learn more.

The key to running modern software like Windows 11 through emulation is a something known as JIT which stands for Just-in-time compilation.

You can get more in the weeds on JIT by reading its description online, but the basics are that it allows your device to recompile the emulated code into something more native, allowing modern devices to run it effectively. For example, without JIT, it’s impossible to run a 3DS emulator on an iPhone 13 because it’s not powerful enough to brute force through the 3D game’s code. With JIT, it can more or less translate that code on the fly to something more understandable by a modern computer. For comparison, the more powerful iPhone 16s can play 3DS games without JIT.

Android has allowed the use of JIT programming on its platform, but Apple has held it back from iOS/iPadOS even though it now allows emulation. One theory for this is because with JIT, users can emulate modern game consoles like the Nintendo Switch, which might have made Nintendo and other game companies unhappy.

In the EU, you can easily download third-party app stores, making this process a little more straightforward than it is in the rest of the world. In Canada, you need to download a program called the AltServer on your computer so you can download apps that haven’t been approved for the Apple App Store.

There are a few steps to this, and it’s a bit of a hurdle for average users who don’t like messing with software. However, once you have it set up, you can install the AltStore on your iPhone/iPad, and through it, you can use various forms of getting JIT to work. The main version we have access to involves using AltJIT, which relies on your computer to help unpack the code. This works, but in my experience, it is very finicky.

In the EU there’s a new app on the AltStore called StikDebug that lets you run JIT on your phone/tablet without the need for a nearby computer. For the time being, there is a Testflight version of StikDebug that anyone in the world can use, but it appears it will only be valid for the next 89 days, so it’s unclear what will happen once the Testflight trial ends.