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If you’re one of the lucky few to get your hands on the new Apple iPhone Duo, then you’ll be glad to know there’s already an array of applications, emulators, and frontends built specifically for you, the most popular being the Delta emulator, which just launched V2.0 for the Duo specifically, but there’s now a new app on the market, known as Bitfold that plays .GB and .GBC games exclusively for now.
The whole screen becomes a pocket console with a D-pad, A and B, Start and Select, and it comes with twelve original games written for the app exclusively. The app comes in twelve colour editions, each with a matching Home Screen icon. On iPhone Duo, it’s a pocket console on the outer display when closed; folded like a laptop, it becomes a clamshell, with the game on the top half, the controls and a companion screen below, and the console’s hinge drawn over the real fold; folded like a book, it opens into two pages, so nothing sits on the crease.
The game keeps running through every change. The twelve Bitfold Originals are Sprout’s Quest, Lantern Keep, Nova Courier, Turbo Lane, Prism Drop, Tidepool Pinball, Pixel Postcards, Pocket Links, Noodle, Brick Bounce, Paper Harbour and Pockling, each a real cartridge image. You can also add cartridges you own as .gb, .gbc or .zip files. Emulation runs on the open-source SameBoy core, with rewind, fast-forward, save states, battery saves, haptics, Bluetooth controllers and keyboards. There are no ads, no accounts and no tracking, and the app never connects to the internet. Though it’s worth noting that the developers lean heavily into AI-assisted development, so the games added are very low quality and not ones you will remember. If anything, it devalues the entire app in my opinion.
I am all for seeing cool new emulation software in the space, and the design of the Duo emulator itself does look interesting, but it’s hard to ignore that this looks entirely vibe-coded, even down to the games that come with it and the company’s website. The games are blatantly attempting to look like certain intellectual property. Emulators and retro gaming software should support retro game developers, or offer some kind of value, but for me, this doesn’t do either and is yet another app that we reccomend staying away from for now, until they offer something unique in the space.
If this does look like your cup of tea and you want to put it to the test, the Bitfold app is available to download from the App Store for free, and it can even be experienced in your browser for free without any accounts. Though I do reccomend looking elsewhere, the Delta Emulator has been around for years, gets regularly updated and has a genuinly passionate team of retro gamers behind it. Tread carefully, folks.
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