LiveExec32 port to (Intel) Mac

[TheGuyWhoIsIdiot]

For a few weeks now, I've been working privately on a small side project to target LiveExec32's code to run under Mac OS.
Duy has already attempted to work on porting the code to Catalyst, but he has faced some little technical problems in which he couldn't solve. This is just a proof-of-concept that legacy iOS apps can run under Macs, especially Intel.

LiveExec32 primarily targets ARM64 to translate the guest code to the host and some of the functions deeply linked to Dynarmic (the JIT engine behind LiveExec32) had some hard coded architecture specific code. I had to automatically translate the instructions, as you can see in the backend.

If you understand what Catalyst can provide, it rips off some features which were deprecated prior to iOS 12. OpenGLES support on Intel is out of the questions for now.
Most of the code is written by LLM and I hope I can make a revision to the codebase and make a contribution here. No ETA.

Images:

[khanhduytran0]

Cool, I wasn't thinking of adding support for Intel Mac. Are OpenGLES libraries not available at all? try ANGLE + detached shims from MetalANGLE

[TheGuyWhoIsIdiot]

I am already working on the GLES support with ANGLE using OpenGL.framework since it has full support to GLES 3.0, meeting Apple's latest specifications shortly before they deprecated development over Metal.

[upintheairsheep]

iOS went from the most unemulatable unportable platform to one of the most portable, emulated platforms in the span of a few months or weeks even

[TheGuyWhoIsIdiot]

Man I thought the same before and always wished for it to come through one point

[upintheairsheep]

But it'd also be nice to get support for LiveContainer on macOS as well, especially as a way to run iOS apps on macOS without administrator privileges. Especially safely running iOS system applications in /Applications.

[TheGuyWhoIsIdiot]

Thankfully, the entitlements required for executing JIT is included under Catalyst and Dynarmic supports well under macOS.

Porting LiveContainer might be worth to try, though may only be exclusive for arm64 hosts as it only passes through natively the code, however working with LiveExec32 is far more feasible for since it has a (somewhat) flexible support across other architectures, within just being the exception of the bridge code and dynarmic system calls as it has some hard coded assembly code for arm64 since passing values breaks the process if the code was written in C due to the broken obj-c envelope.