Experimental Free game library · v0.12
GameBox for iOS is a free game library with the emulators built in. It plays 60 retro systems itself, with nothing else to install, and shows your games as one shelf with box art, descriptions and favourites. It is the iOS version of DroidGameBox, and it runs on the emulators of GameBox for the Mac. It is experimental: it is not on the App Store, you install it yourself, and it has been tried on only a few devices.
Power-ups
Someone who uses DroidGameBox can pick this up and find it is basically the same app: the same shelves, the same screens, the same touch layouts, on the emulators of GameBox for the Mac.
60 systems play inside the app, from the Atari 2600 and the NES to the Saturn, the Neo Geo and the arcade boards of Capcom, Sega and Namco. They are the emulators of GameBox for the Mac, written in Swift. There is nothing else to install.
Each system gets on-screen controls shaped for it: a D-pad and the right buttons, six on a Mega Drive pad, four on the Neo Geo, a keypad where the machine had one. The picture is never under the notch or the Dynamic Island, and no control overlaps another on any iPhone or iPad. A game controller works too.
Held upright, the picture goes across the top and the controls sit underneath. Turned sideways, the controls are at the sides of the picture. Every screen of the app works both ways up, on an iPhone and on an iPad.
Box art, 3D boxes or screenshots; year, players, developer, genre and a description, fetched from ScreenScraper and the libretro thumbnails. Favourites, playlists of your own, and a Last Played shelf put you back in the game. Manuals open in the app, where ScreenScraper has one.
The system screen has ten looks and a shelf of games nine, changed with one button: a line, a grid, a carousel at either side, one system full screen, Cover Flow as the old iPhone had it, and four retro looks (8-bit, green phosphor, amber and monochrome) that turn the pictures into big pixels or a phosphor screen's one colour.
The game menu saves a checkpoint with a picture of the moment and loads it later. While you play, GameBox keeps a moment every fifteen seconds for the last fifteen minutes, and Rewind takes you back to one of them. A game's own saves are kept for you.
Drag a ROMs folder and a bios folder onto the app in Finder, or use the Files app, or point GameBox at a folder you already have on iCloud Drive, a USB drive or an SD card. A start-up wizard asks where everything is.
Sign in to retroachievements.org in Settings and the achievements for supported games appear in the game as cards. With no account entered, GameBox never contacts them.
Turn on Period look and each system's picture is drawn as on its own screen, a television's or a handheld's LCD; or choose pixel-perfect scaling, the Game Boy's colours and borders, the Virtual Boy's display, and sharper 3D for the Model 2 and System 22 arcade games.
Screens
All taken from the app itself, in the iPhone and iPad Simulators, with an iPhone held sideways. The games are Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Metal Slug 3, Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Daytona USA.
On an iPad
The same screens fill an iPad, in either way up. These two are from the iPad Pro 11-inch Simulator.
Built in
Each plays in the app itself. Your games go in a folder per system, named as ES-DE names them, and a system with no games doesn't appear.
GameBox for iOS contains no games and no BIOS files. Systems that need a BIOS use files you supply. System names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners.
How to start
It isn't on the App Store, so you install the app yourself with a sideloading tool. That takes a few minutes, and with a free Apple ID you do it again every week. The ZIP holds a Quick Start Guide and a Manual that say it all in more detail.
Save GameBox-iOS-0.12-experimental.zip (15 MB) and unzip it. It holds the app, GameBox-0.12.ipa, the Quick Start Guide and the Manual, both PDFs.
The IPA is unsigned. Give it to a sideloading tool such as AltStore or Sideloadly, which signs it with your own Apple ID and installs it on your iPhone or iPad, by cable or over Wi-Fi. Follow that tool's own instructions; we have not tried every tool.
On the device: Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Developer Mode, then restart when iOS asks. A sideloaded app will not open without it. If iOS asks you to trust the developer, it is in Settings ▸ General ▸ VPN & Device Management.
Connect the device to your Mac, open Finder, choose the device in the sidebar and click Files. Drag a ROMs folder (a folder for each system in it: nes, snes, megadrive and so on) and a bios folder onto GameBox. Or choose a folder on iCloud Drive, a USB drive or an SD card in the app's Settings.
GameBox asks where your games and BIOS files are, scans them, and fetches box art and information in the background (that needs the internet, and takes a while for a big library). Tap a system, tap a game, tap it again to play. The Menu button in a game opens the game menu.
With a free Apple ID the app stops opening after seven days: sign and install it again. A paid Apple Developer Program membership signs for a year. A newer IPA installs the same way. If your tool gives the app another identifier, iOS treats it as another app, with folders of its own.
Does it run on mine?
Very little, and we say so. This is what was run, and what happened.
| Device | iOS | What was run |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 15 Pro Max a real phone | iOS 27.0.1 | ✓ 45 of 45 runs: the app stood 38 systems, a game or two of each; each started, played a few seconds and left through the game menu, once or twice. Every game kept its own frame rate: a frame cost 0.8 to 15.9 ms of the 16.7 there are at 60 frames a second. The Saturn, Model 2, Namco System 22, ST-V and CP System III were among them. A library of 929 games (7.2 GB) was copied to it and the app ran on it. |
| iPhone 17 Pro Simulator | iOS 26.5 | ✓ 37 of 37 systems a game of each played for 33 seconds, a checkpoint saved and loaded, a moment rewound to, and the game left through its menu. And 37 of 37 games played for a long time, with the memory they used measured. Every screen and look was looked at, both ways up. |
| iPad Pro 11-inch Simulator | iOS 26.5 | Every screen and look, both ways up, looked at by eye; a game played. Not a real iPad. |
The real iPhone ran a build for developers (the same code, with a few test hooks); the simulators ran the same. The games were started by those hooks, not by hand, so what was counted is that the app and each emulator stand, play and leave, not how a game plays. Where a game plays well on your device depends on the device: the frame costs above are from the first seconds of each game, and the most demanding scenes of the most demanding games were not measured. Nothing was tried on a real iPad, on other iPhones, with a game controller or with a sideloading tool other than Xcode.
Questions
No. GameBox for iOS is a library and a player: it finds, shows and plays games you already have. It contains no ROMs or disc images and links to none. Some systems need BIOS files from the real machine, which you supply.
Yes: free, with no account, no ads and no paid tier, and it stays that way. Several of the emulators inside it are licensed for free, non-commercial use only, which is one reason it is never sold.
It is an experiment, made to see how far the emulators of GameBox for the Mac go on an iPhone and an iPad, and it is not ready for a store. The emulators in it are other people's projects under licences of their own, several of which allow free, non-commercial use only. So you download an unsigned IPA here and install it yourself.
An app that you sign with a free Apple ID is signed for seven days. When they are up, iOS refuses to open it until it is signed and installed again; a tool such as AltStore can do that for you while it is on the same Wi-Fi as its computer. A paid Apple Developer Program membership signs for a year.
It is built for iOS 17 or later, for iPhone and iPad, on 64-bit ARM. It has been run on an iPhone 15 Pro Max (iOS 27) and in the Simulator on an iPhone and an iPad: see the table above. How fast a system runs depends on the device; the table says what we measured.
Those emulators work by generating machine code while they run (a "JIT"), which iOS does not let ordinary apps do. So the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, PSP, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii and PlayStation 2 are not here; only the systems whose emulators run without one are. If a way is found, they may come later. DroidGameBox on Android has them.
No: the emulators are inside the app. A RetroArch system folder works as GameBox's BIOS folder as it is.
There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. It reaches the internet only to fetch pictures and details for your games (libretro's thumbnail server and ScreenScraper) and, if you sign in, to RetroAchievements. Your logins are kept in the device's Keychain. The privacy page lists them.
The emulators inside it are other people's projects, each under its own licence, which the list below gives with where to find its source; the licence texts are also in the app, under Settings ▸ Credits. Several of those licences allow free, non-commercial use only, which is why GameBox is never sold.
Compare its SHA-256 checksum with the one beside the download button. On a Mac, shasum -a 256 in Terminal prints it.
GameBox for iOS v0.12, experimental. Free, and staying that way.
Built on others' work · licences
Every emulator in GameBox for iOS is somebody else's project. Each is used under its own licence, and where that licence asks for it, its source is available from the address shown. The licence texts are in the app, under Settings ▸ Credits.
| Part | What it does here | Made by | Licence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac GameBox's emulators | The Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 and Jaguar, the NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Boy and Game & Watch, the Mega Drive, 32X, Mega-CD and Master System, the Saturn, ST-V, SuperGrafx, Neo Geo and Neo Geo Pocket, Capcom's CPS-1, CPS-2 and CPS-3, Sega's Model 2 and Namco's System 22, the WonderSwan, the Atari Lynx, the ColecoVision, Intellivision, Odyssey 2 and Vectrex, the Commodore computers, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, MSX, Archimedes, Amiga, Apple II, Atari 800 and Sharp X68000, the CD-i, and PICO-8: the same code as the Mac's, so that what one saves the other loads | Mac GameBox, after MAME, ymfm, Handy, gw-libretro with Lua and bzip2, zepto8 with z8lua and eris, libchdr and others, each named in its licence | BSD 3-Clause, zlib, MIT, WTFPL and others | macgamebox.com |
| Swift | The language Mac GameBox's emulators are written in: its runtime, built into them | Apple Inc. and the Swift project authors | Apache 2.0 with the Runtime Library Exception | swift.org |
| Handy | The Atari Lynx without its boot ROM | K. Wilkins, and libretro | zlib licence | github.com/libretro/libretro-handy |
| rcheevos 12.5 | RetroAchievements: finds a game's achievements and checks them as you play | RetroAchievements.org | MIT | github.com/RetroAchievements/rcheevos |
| libretro | The thumbnail server and the names of BIOS files | The RetroArch team | MIT | libretro.com |
| LZMA SDK | 7z archives of games | Igor Pavlov | Public domain | 7-zip.org |
| No-Intro and Redump, through libretro-database | The games' names, found by each game's checksum or file name (the Neo Geo's and Capcom's come from FinalBurn Neo, the arcade's from MAME) | No-Intro, Redump and libretro | Their terms | github.com/libretro/libretro-database |
| libretro thumbnails | Box art, title screens and screenshots | The libretro thumbnails contributors | Their terms | thumbnails.libretro.com |
| ScreenScraper | Descriptions, ratings, dates, developers, publishers, genres, players, 3D boxes, game manuals, and the systems' photos and backgrounds | ScreenScraper and its contributors | Their terms | screenscraper.fr |
| RetroAchievements | The achievements and their badges | RetroAchievements.org and its developers | Their terms | retroachievements.org |
| DroidGameBox | The look of the screens, the touch layouts, the system logos and histories, which this app copies | Hugh Allan | — | macgamebox.com |
Some of these were changed to fit GameBox. For the source of any of them as it is built into this app, changes included, write to bhprojects.help@gmail.com: it will be sent, for at least three years from the date of the version, to anyone who asks.
GameBox iOS