Azahar 2127.0 Alpha 1 plays 3DS games on iPhones as old as the XS without JIT, and moves to GPLv3

Azahar 2127.0 Alpha 1, out on 10 October, swaps the 3DS emulator's old interpreter for a far faster one aimed at iPhones that cannot use JIT, and moves the project to GPLv3+.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Two days after a security fix in 2126.2, the Azahar team put out the first prerelease of its next version. Azahar 2127.0 Alpha 1, published on 10 October, carries a new CPU interpreter for the 3DS emulator and a change of licence, along with a batch of rendering and audio fixes. As an alpha, the team says it is not yet considered stable and is meant for people willing to test.

A faster interpreter for phones without JIT

Emulators usually translate a console's code into the host's own instructions on the fly, a technique called JIT. Apple does not allow that on iPhones and Apple TVs, so there Azahar has to fall back on an interpreter, which runs each instruction in turn and is much slower. The alpha replaces the old DynCom interpreter with a new one called FastInterp, written by warmenhoven in pull request 2376. The release notes say it brings greatly improved performance on iOS and tvOS, letting devices as old as the iPhone XS play games, even with playback speeds of over 200%.

In the pull request, warmenhoven writes that nothing in it is truly novel and that the ideas were adapted from other codebases, including Dolphin and Dynarmic. Under the project's AI policy the author disclosed that AI designed and wrote the tests used to check the interpreter, and that those tests were left out of the submission. During review, maintainer OpenSauce04 noted that emulation slowed to single-digit frame rates with the CECD LLE module enabled, possibly linked to a separate known issue, and left it to check later.

To get the interpreter in front of iOS users, the team says it will ship all 2127.0 prereleases on RetroArch with a delay of two to three days, a one-off exception to its usual schedule.

GPLv3 and other changes

Azahar's licence moves from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+. The notes say every downstream project exposed to Azahar's source must follow the new terms and update its licence metadata. Pull request 2626 says only that the change was carefully considered in an external discussion.

Elsewhere, a colour blending fix in the Vulkan renderer removes a black box that appeared around defeated enemies in Shin Megami Tensei IV, and nearest neighbour filtering now replaces linear filtering where it was misused, fixing textures in Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition. The HLE audio path gains a missing delay and echo effect, which restores echoes in games such as New Super Mario Bros. 2 and fixes stuttering music in Shinobi 3D. Texture codec work brings general speed gains, and zero-area render passes are now skipped, addressing glitches in 3D Thunder Blade.

On desktop, Azahar now bundles its own FFmpeg, so the Dump Video feature no longer needs a separate install. The Windows MSYS2 build is gone in favour of the MXE build, and the Anime4K texture filter can now only be chosen with the OpenGL renderer because of ongoing issues. The alpha also clears the existing shader cache, so the team warns performance may dip for a while after updating.

Sources

• 2127.0-alpha1: ci: Correct ARM64 Linux job using cache for tags (GitHub)
• Implement new 'FastInterp' interpreter (GitHub)
• Update project license to GPLv3+, was GPLv2+ (GitHub)

Image: Azahar project via Flathub