touchHLE
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hikari-no-yume
Suggestion for the far future: iPhoneOS 1.0 app (.pxl) support
About fifteen years ago, people would write their own homebrew apps to run on the 1st generation iPod Touch and iPhone since iPhone OS 1.0 didn't have an app store. These apps would be in the .pxl format, and their structure seems to be similar to .ipa files. Some of the apps made were things like a port of the shareware of DOOM (without audio or controls), a NES emulator that may have been an early wip of Nescaline, a homebrew version of iPong, etc. I think in the far future we could maybe see support for these apps, as it's as important to see their history preserved as much as the apps made after them.
For clarification to others, there could be multiple reasons as to why iPhone OS 1.0 app support isn't mentioned anywhere here. Either it could be these apps just weren't known to the world (so far I could only find one video on YouTube showing one being used), or the fact that they rely on a completely different set of instructions, or something else. It is possible to install a .pxl file to later 32-bit iPhone models by renaming their extensions to .ipa but launching them will always result in a crash due to missing said instructions.
For anyone who wants to see the one video of one of these apps in action, here it is: https://youtu.be/Xoz79W1bGXM?si=1NpryrpV1wo0dY46
For anyone curious, currently when renaming a .pxl to .ipa and putting it into the apps folder for touchHLE, the app will not show up in the emulator.
Yeah so the thing is that iPhone OS 1.x was an unstable platform without public documentation. Apple weren't intending anyone except themselves to make apps for it. There might be some things that could be done to improve touchHLE's support for iPhone OS 1.x apps, but it's undoubtedly trickier to support than 2.x and later.
By the way, touchHLE supports .app bundles (directories) directly. The .ipa file support is just for convenience and wasn't there in the first version. If you can extract the .app bundle from the .pxl file somehow, it might work in touchHLE.
I've tested that just now since .pxl files can be extracted with 7zip, touchHLE just crashes when starting up.