You may find it hard to believe, but a developer has achieved running Windows PC games on an iPhone, without cloud streaming or remote desktop—just running locally on the phone. An open-source project called Madeira has recently sparked discussion in the community, successfully getting PC games such as Stray, Cyberpunk 2077, ULTRAKILL, and Thumper to run on a non-jailbroken iPhone. Although frame rates are currently low and it is still experimental, this means the technical barrier to PC game emulation on iOS has been broken.
This matters because iOS has long been considered an “impossible task” for PC game emulation. The Android ecosystem has long had tools like Winlator that can run Windows games on phones via Wine and Box64, but iOS’s sandboxing, memory protection, and JIT restrictions made the same approach impossible to port directly. The emergence of Madeira proves that these restrictions all have corresponding solutions.
Four-layer translation pipeline: from x86 instructions to Metal graphics
Madeira’s core architecture strings four open-source projects into a single pipeline. A Windows game’s x86-64 machine code is first translated into ARM64 instructions by FEX-Emu, then Windows API calls are converted into macOS/iOS Darwin system calls through Wine’s ARM64EC mode, and finally DXMT converts DirectX 11 graphics commands directly into Apple’s Metal API. The entire process runs on iOS as a single Mach process, while wineserver exists as a thread rather than a separate process.
Developer Will Faust started this project in March 2026, and it has accumulated 192 commits so far. The currently supported games include: Thumper and ULTRAKILL run smoothly, Marvel Cosmic Invasion can launch but occasionally crashes, and Cyberpunk 2077 can reach the game screen but has a low frame rate.
Cyberpunk 2077 just ran on an iPhone.
Not through cloud gaming.
Not through Remote Play.
Natively.
A new open-source project called Madeira is bringing Windows PC games to non-jailbroken iPhones.
It combines:
• Wine (ARM64EC)
• FEX x86-64 translation
• DirectX 11 → Metal… pic.twitter.com/wip5pbUgax— Techjunkie Aman (@Techjunkie_Aman) September 11, 2026
The traditional pipeline for running Windows games on macOS is DirectX → DXVK (to Vulkan) → MoltenVK (Vulkan to Metal) → GPU, and this route has been widely used in tools such as CrossOver and Whisky on Mac. But Madeira chose a different path: using DXMT Translate D3D11 directly into Metal, skipping the Vulkan intermediate layer. DXMT was independently developed by developer 3Shain. Compared with the two-layer conversion of DXVK + MoltenVK, DXMT’s single-layer direct translation uses less memory, and performance is also better in some games.
Practical usage threshold
The barrier to entry for Madeira is currently quite high. First, you need to sideload the app, which requires tools such as Xcode or Sideloadly. Second, you need to enable JIT through StikDebug. The most troublesome part is that provisioning profiles signed with a free Apple ID expire every 7 days, so you have to sideload again. However, game saves and Wine prefixes are kept in the App container and will not be lost after reinstalling.
Because JIT requires a debugger attach, Madeira cannot be distributed through the App Store and can only be installed via sideloading. This also means it will never become a “normal” App Store app—at least not until Apple changes its JIT policy.
Another tweet showed Stray running on an iPhone 17 Pro Max using a DirectX → DXVK → MoltenVK → Metal pipeline, with pretty good performance as well. This pipeline is closer to the architecture CrossOver uses on macOS, meaning PC game emulation on iPhone already has more than one viable route.
BREAKING: PC emulation has arrived on iPhone & iPad and the performance is pretty solid
Here’s a video of Stray running on the iPhone 17 Pro Max
DirectX -> DXVK -> MoltenVK -> Metal pic.twitter.com/1cyhTqMQEw
— Pixel Gamer 4k (@4k_isn) September 10, 2026
The Convergence of Open Source Ecosystems
Madeira didn’t appear out of nowhere; it is the result of multiple open-source projects converging. FEX-Emu is a Valve-sponsored x86 emulator that is also used by Steam Frame, Valve’s ARM64 VR headset, to run PC games, meaning running x86 games on ARM64 devices is already an industry-level technical direction. DXMT has been integrated into macOS gaming tools such as CrossOver, Whisky, and Porting Kit, and is becoming increasingly mature on Mac. Wine, meanwhile, is a Windows compatibility layer with more than 30 years of history, and ARM64EC support lets it run natively on Apple Silicon. Each of these projects solves a piece of the puzzle, and Madeira puts them together, proving that running PC games under iOS’s strict restrictions is feasible.
Madeira – GitHub
For iPhone users, this means the phone is no longer just a device that can “play mobile games.” As Apple continues to improve the GPU performance of its A-series chips, and the open-source community keeps pushing past iOS’s software restrictions, running PC games on an iPhone is going from “impossible” to “only a matter of time.” Madeira’s current performance is not yet enough to replace any game console, but the door it has opened is worth continued attention as things develop.
At present, Madeira is still a research project, and the developer explicitly writes in the README, “expect rough edges, per-title quirks and breaking changes.” But it has already crossed the most critical technical threshold, and what comes next is performance optimization and ongoing improvements to game compatibility.
Source: KOCPC Chinese