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OatmealDome / dolphin-ios

Dolphin for iOS, reborn
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[Feature Request] Apple TV (tvOS) support #125

Open kerberjg opened 7 months ago

kerberjg commented 7 months ago

I’d love to see tvOS available as a supported target. Apple TV is as capable hardware-wise as any other average iOS device, perhaps without the power/thermal constraints.

It’s a quite popular device for emulation with quite a few RetroArch cores being supported, it’d be amazing to bring a few more generations of gaming available on it with GameCube/Wii.

I work with software development at my day job, and I have the tools/experience necessary to help out with testing and I’d be happy to contribute ✨

Some points about development that might be relevant:

  1. tvOS apps can’t store data in storage like iOS apps can. They can hold data in “cache”, and as per my testing it’s possible to use it to store even a lot of data, as long as your total local storage is not too full (at which point the OS will just yoink the cache)
  2. RetroArch has some workarounds for the above, such as allowing uploads via HTTP on local network, or remote storage access
  3. Apps can share most code between tvOS/iOS (with any exceptions handled by the preprocessor or programmatic checks) except for storyboards, those need to be recreated
OatmealDome commented 7 months ago

I've had some interest in a tvOS target in the past (I even architected the 4.0.0+ codebase to more easily add additional targets), but this interest has waned.

The fact that Apple makes it hard to exist on their platforms in the first place has killed a lot of the enthusiasm I have for the DolphiniOS project. So, for now, I'm only really interested in maintaining an iOS version.

Maybe in the future.

Spidy123222 commented 7 months ago

Hopefully sideloading stuff from eu trickles down to their other platforms. TvOS isn't that easy to use for sideloaded content so idk how viable it would be. Especially the cache storage solution. Current Sideloading restrictions is a turn off for people. The eu app markets are still being investigated in how they work and the jit situation with the webengine stuff Apple allows.