New Fan Project Brings Xbox One Games to iPhone Without Emulating the Hardware

A developer who goes by levi on X has announced Utsuro, a new project that runs Xbox One games on Apple devices. It's still very early, but the developer says it already runs Minecraft: Xbox One Edition "extremely well," and the attached video shows it running on iOS with touchscreen controls. According to the project's GitHub page, Minecraft hits around 36 to 60 FPS on the Mac build, and Sonic Mania and Rocket League run there too, complete with screenshots. Sonic Mania is marked as playable at around 57 FPS with sound, while Rocket League renders and drives at roughly 15 to 20 FPS, with dark lighting and no audio yet.

Utsuro also works differently from a typical emulator. Apparently, it skips hardware emulation altogether and runs the console's Windows-based software layer as x86-64 code on Apple's Arm chips through FEXCore, and fills in the system pieces the console itself would normally provide. Graphics go through Apple's Metal API, with the Xbox One's Direct3D 11.X shaders converted to Metal's shader language, while audio runs on CoreAudio. Getting it running isn't exactly simple either. On iOS, the app has to be sideloaded, needs a JIT helper like StikDebug, TrollStore, or a jailbroken device, and expects a decrypted dump of the game. The macOS version currently has to be built from source. Read full story