Look, it’s very simple: if a device I own has the ability to run old racing games, I use it for that purpose. A few weeks ago, Apple opened the floodgates to emulating old video game consoles on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and just this week, RetroArch, perhaps the most popular emulation software there is , has landed on the company’s App Store. Last night our editor Kyle told us he had received Rush to San Francisco running on his Apple TV. I don’t own one, but I have an iPhone 14 Pro; and that’s it, I now have Raging Runner in my pocket.
So this is a very exciting development for retro gamers in the Apple ecosystem, especially for those of us who particularly love our classic racing cars, as the 90s and early 2000s had the best of the lot. Thanks to RetroArch, which is considered a “front-end” because it compiles a multitude of different “cores” that actually handle the heavy lifting of running games, you can sample everything from the Atari days to the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation Portable. This seems to be about where the timeline ends; I don’t see a core for Sega Dreamcast in the app as downloaded, and once you get to the PS2 and GameCube (don’t even mention the original Xbox), the emulation becomes considerably more power hungry and complex.
The original PlayStation, however, is a breeze. I remember playing Gran Turismo 2 on my first Motorola Droid in a final year study hall, and that was over a decade ago, so it’s low sweat for today’s Apple Silicon. Really, the only obstacles to enjoying a classic like Raging Runner on your iPhone right now are 1) your access to an actual controller and 2) setting up the dang app. RetroArch can be a bit of a bear even on a desktop computer, so you can imagine that on the screen of a mobile device, with the limited file system freedom that iOS allows, you run into annoyances pretty quickly.
For example, if you’re AirDropping your game saves from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to make sure they’re unzipped before landing on your device, because the iOS Files app can’t do that. all alone. (There are third-party apps that can, but I sampled three before finding one that actually worked.) Without going into too much detail here, some RetroArch cores can run games while compressed, but if you play a PS1 title in .bin/.cue format, like Raging Runner, with Red Book audio as many early PlayStation racing games had, you won’t have music during gameplay if you load the title without unzipping it first. And frankly, a Ridge Runner a game without jams is not really Ridge Runnernor anything that interests me.
Once you have that sorted, everything is pretty simple. To my great surprise, even Sega Rally Championship on the Sega Saturn – a platform comparatively harder to emulate than the PS1 – was flawless thanks to the Beetle Saturn core. The lack of time before the second Forest stage checkpoint was entirely due to the touchscreen controls, rather than the quality of the emulation itself.
As such, I can’t stress this enough to my fellow retro racers: if you haven’t tried emulation on Apple devices yet, give it a try. Yes, I have these games on my MacBook Air and my gaming PC, and if I owned a Steam Deck I would definitely have them too. But there’s something really special about knowing that whatever I do, wherever I am, I could shoot Sega Rally in my damn pocket. Who said there isn’t a cure for boredom?
Do you want to talk about racing games? Contact me at adam.ismail@thedrive.com
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