Developer brings Xbox One games to iPhone without emulating hardware

A developer who goes by levi on X has announced Utsuro, a new project that runs Xbox One games on Apple devices. The project already runs Minecraft: Xbox One Edition on iOS with touchscreen controls, according to a video shared by the developer.

Utsuro works differently from typical emulators by skipping hardware emulation and running the Xbox One's Windows-based software layer as x86-64 code on Apple's Arm chips through FEXCore. Graphics go through Apple's Metal API with Direct3D 11.X shaders converted to Metal's shader language, while audio runs on CoreAudio.

On Mac, Minecraft hits around 36 to 60 FPS according to the project's GitHub page. Sonic Mania runs at around 57 FPS with sound, while Rocket League renders at roughly 15 to 20 FPS with dark lighting and no audio yet.

Getting Utsuro running requires sideloading on iOS, a JIT helper like StikDebug or TrollStore or a jailbroken device, and a decrypted dump of the game. The macOS version currently has to be built from source.