- #IPHONE EMULATOR FOR MAC OS INSTALL#
- #IPHONE EMULATOR FOR MAC OS CODE#
- #IPHONE EMULATOR FOR MAC OS SIMULATOR#
You are prompted to install these two resources the first time you launch Quantum Visualizer. Contrubitions can be made in case someone is interested.You are here: Configuring Your Computer > Install platform SDKs and their emulators > iOS SDK and emulator iOS SDK and Emulatorīuilding and testing iOS applications in Quantum Visualizer requires two primary resources: Java SE 7 runtime, which is required by Eclipse, the hosting application of Quantum Visualizer and Xcode, the SDK for iOS and Mac OS. So we decided to open source the whole project.
Meanwhile, after Apple has unleashed ARM-based M1 and corresponding macOS, the necessity and the challenging of the project goes down. Now this project runs 2 apps from China successfully: WeChat and game Arena of Valor. As the work goes on, the complexity of the whole emulation system has gone far beyond our expectation. The most challenged among which, is the massive reverse engineering in order to make iOS App run flawlessly. For example, the acceleration and compatibility of Objective-C system, Metal API, hack of xnu by kernel extension. In addition to thoese, there were still many more problems for running the emulator on x86-64-based macOS. We have re-compiled the libunwind for that. When an exception is thrown, the original unwinding logic does not work properly in searching the correct exception handler. There are both x86-64 and ARM function frames in the stack.
#IPHONE EMULATOR FOR MAC OS SIMULATOR#
The open source version of dyld is missing many important header files, compiling of which is much harder than we have expected, leaving us to the last option, binary matches to the dyld_sim (the dyld the simulator uses).Ĭ++ exception is another major problem we have encountered. We have 2 options: making patches on the binary or compiling altered source from Apple. dyld, the dynamic linker from Apple, does not support this. We must keep 2 copies of libc++.dylib in the memory, one is x86-64-based, the other one is ARM-based.
#IPHONE EMULATOR FOR MAC OS CODE#
The frameworks code from Apple, who is x86-64-based, also uses C++. In order to solve the problem, we abondened the idea of ABI bridge on this part, seeking to provide an ARM-based libc++.dylib to the iOS App we are emulating.Ī new problem comes along with it. These changes are significantly hard to identify, making it impossible to do this part of ABI bridge. Under different instructions, the foundation framework, the memory layout of a class, the arrangement or implementation of virtual function table are slightly different. Nevertheless, the ABI includes not only c standards but also c++ ones.
In order to do that, we hacked compiler of LLVM, scanning the whole SDK, generating all API parameter infomation, under which part of the ABI bridge may finally work. We have to build an ABI bridge for 2 instructions for they have different ABI standards.
In the whole emulation, only the instructions within the iOS App is run in the mode of qemu JIT, while all the frameworks from Apple run natively on Intel CPU. First, and most obviously, we face the problem of instruction translation between x86-64 and ARM. The are many puzzles to solve in order to run ARM-based iOS Apps on x86-based systems. We abandoned the plan due to efficiency and compatibility problems. Our emulator once has a Virtulbox-based shell in which macOS runs, so the whole system runs in Windows. We modified and hacked a lot on the simulator, making it possbile to run ARM-based commerical iOS Apps released in AppStore inside iOS Simulator. The iOS Simulator that comes with Xcode is capable of running iOS Apps based on x86 instructions, which means you must own the source. The emulator runs on Intel x86-64 macOS/Xcode (This release works under Catalina). When there was no working iOS emulator throughout the world, we decided to work one out for ourselves. However, our development settled years ago. In the year of 2021, Apple has unleashed ARM-based M1 chips for macintosh, making it much easier to run iOS Apps on PC-platform. Hello everyone, we present a working iOS App emulator for x86-based macOS here. Take note that this list is live and based on most frequent questions in posts will be updated with "quicklinks". There's too many to list them all, however here's a convenient link to all programming guides at