Delta takes flight: Apple-approved Nintendo emulator is a great iOS option

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Apple's decision earlier this month to open the iOS App Store to generic retro game emulators is already bearing fruit. Delta launched Wednesday as one of the first officially approved iOS apps to emulate Nintendo consoles from the NES through the N64 and the Game Boy through the Nintendo DS (though unofficial options have snuck through in the past).

Delta is an outgrowth of developer Riley Testut's earlier sideloadable GBA4iOS project, which recently had its own unauthorized clone removed from the App Store. Before Wednesday, iOS users could load Delta onto their devices only through AltStore, an iOS marketplace that used a Developer Mode workaround to sideload apps from a self-hosted server. European users can now get that AltStore directly on their iOS devices (for a small 1.50 euro/year fee), while North American users can simply download Delta for free from the iOS App Store, with no ads or user tracking to boot.

All that history means Delta is far from a slapdash app quickly thrown together to take advantage of Apple's new openness to emulation. The app is obviously built with iOS in mind and already integrates some useful features designed for the mobile ecosystem. While there are some updates we'd like to see in the future, this represents a good starting point for where Apple-approved game emulation can go on iOS.

Get a real controller

The biggest issue with Delta—as with practically any other smartphone-based retro emulator—is trying to control the emulation with touchscreen controls. Tapping on a flat, undifferentiated screen can provide a passable experience when playing turn-based RPGs or tactical sims, we suppose. But any game that requires even the faintest hint of reflexes suffers greatly without the immediate tactile feedback you get from physical buttons, d-pads, and analog sticks.

To its credit, Delta does its best to ameliorate this inherent issue. The use of Haptic Touch (on supported iOS devices) provides a subtle vibration every time your thumb finds a new virtual "button" on the touch screen, which helps at least a little bit when blindly hunting during action sequences. Delta's menus also include the (somewhat buried) ability to automatically hold down specifics buttons without physical input, which can be especially useful for racing game accelerators or run buttons in platform games. We'd love to see this feature expanded even further to support an auto-fire option for shoot-em-ups and other games that require a lot of repetitive button presses.

And when it come to aesthetics, Delta lets users download a number of community-made "controller skins" to jazz up the default look of the on-screen controllers (which even work in landscape mode). It's a cute feature, but we'd have much preferred an option to physically move the on-screen buttons to different areas of the screen, which could help a lot for some specific games.

Despite these kinds of touch-control features, by far the best experience you can have with Delta is with some sort of external, physical controller. Luckily, iOS now supports a wide range of custom MFi controllers or generic bluetooth console controllers with a minimum of hassle.

If you can use a controller like this with Delta, do so. Credit: Kyle Orland

When I plugged a PS5 DualSense controller into my iPad with a USB cable, Delta detected it automatically and removed the on-screen control overlay instantly. Oddly, though, the default button mapping settings were not set to correctly match the appropriate SNES face buttons to the corresponding PS5 buttons. I had to dive deep into the settings menus to remap the controls and do so again after I hooked up an Xbox One gamepad via bluetooth.

Once that was done, though, the external controllers felt appropriately snappy and natural. With a cheap phone mount snapped to the controller, Delta can turn your iPhone into a pretty convenient and capable retro machine.

A strong start

Like most emulator apps, Delta isn't distributed with any games. You need to load your own (legally acquired) ROMs via either iTunes file syncing or a connection to Google Drive or Dropbox (you also need to provide your own BIOS files for the Nintendo DS). ROM files for commercial games automatically have a thumbnail of their box art applied in the Delta interface, which helps clean up what could otherwise be an eye-melting list of game/file names.

Once the ROMs are loaded, Delta also offers an automatic syncing option via those cloud providers. When we tested it with Dropbox, the Delta sync automatically made sure our game library, save files, and controller configurations remained consistent across multiple iOS devices.

When it comes to compatibility, we were surprised to find the NES emulation on Delta just doesn't seem to work in the app's current form. Every single NES ROM we tested either presented a black screen or a frozen image of colorful static.

That major issue aside, Delta did a pretty good job of faithfully emulating the games we tested with no noticeable graphics, sound, or latency issues. The only exceptions were a surprising lack of gridiron lines in NFL Blitz 2000 on the N64 and a bit of noticeable slowdown when running Yoshi's Island on a 5th-generation iPad Air (the game ran perfectly well on an iPhone 12).

As far as extra capabilities, Delta provides basic functions like save states (which can be mapped to save/load with a single controller button push for simplicity), a single-speed fast-forward option, and the ability to input codes via emulation of Game Genie, Game Shark, and the like. But Delta is missing some other features you might enjoy on other emulators, such as system-level pausing and frame-advance, rewinding, programmable button macros, and direct memory watching/manipulation.

Some of those expert-level features might be a lot to ask for the first version of a completely free emulator that's also one of the first to hit the iOS App Store. But we hope Delta continues to be updated with new features and emulation cores going forward, because what's here is a great demonstration of the potential inherent in official Apple-approved emulators on iOS.

Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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