Respring Brings 32-Bit iPhone Games Like Peggle and Koi Pond Back to Modern iPhones by Translating Their Old ARM Code
Dylan McDonald's Respring project runs seven 32-bit iOS games, including Peggle, Koi Pond and Chuzzle, on current iPhones through a modified touchHLE runtime. He says an AI agent wrote most of the code.
Peggle on a 2026 iPhone. Not a remake, not a port from PopCap, the original 32-bit binary, bouncing balls off pegs at 120 frames per second.
That’s the trick Respring pulls, and its maker isn’t shy about why. “Some of my favorite games of all time are 32-bit iOS games, which can’t be run on modern Apple devices anymore,” Dylan McDonald (@DylanMcD8) writes on the project’s site. He calls it “an independent preservation project,” and it sits alongside his 9 Archive work.
The wall he’s climbing is old. Apple’s iOS 11 notes put it plainly: “iOS 11 is performance optimized for 64-bit apps. 32-bit apps will need to be updated by the app developer to work with this version of iOS,” per Apple Support. Plenty of developers never came back, and their games just stopped launching.
So far, seven have come back through Respring: Chuzzle, Koi Pond, Peggle, Peggle HD, Skee-Ball, Skee-Ball HD and Skee Free. Each lives in its own GitHub repo and installs as an unsigned ARM64 IPA you sideload with something like Sideloadly, or build yourself in Xcode. The deployment target is iOS 15.
The engine underneath is touchHLE, an open-source “high-level emulator for early iOS apps” written in Rust. It doesn’t emulate an iPhone’s chips and boot iOS. “touchHLE itself takes the place of iOS and provides its own implementations of the system frameworks,” its README says. Its own builds run those games on desktops and Android phones.
Respring moves that runtime onto the phone and changes how the old code runs. For Koi Pond and Chuzzle, it’s “ahead-of-time ARM/Thumb-to-ARM64 translation” on top of “a modified touchHLE compatibility runtime providing the old iOS APIs.” The README ends that line with “No JIT required!” which matters, because iOS doesn’t let a sideloaded app write and run its own machine code on the fly.
Peggle goes the other way: “The original ARM/Thumb game runs through a modified touchHLE interpreter, with native helpers for selected expensive operations.”
The upgrades are the fun part, starting with Koi Pond, which “was stuck at 24 FPS. Now, you can enjoy up to 120 FPS!” Peggle was locked at 30 and now runs at 60 or 120, with the Peggle Nights expansion switched on. Chuzzle “was never updated for anything past iPhone OS 2,” and its original “fully relaunches any time the app closes.” Respring gives it 60 FPS and real multitasking. Peggle’s saves sync over iCloud through a folder in Files. Game Center and the old online services are gone for good.
There’s a Fill Screen option, too, with a note for the newest hardware: “if you are using iPhone Duo, you’ll notice that the aspect ratios of the displays are very close to that of a 3.5-inch iPhone.” A foldable from this month turns out to be a decent home for a game shaped for the iPhone 3G.
The credits are where it gets interesting. The Peggle README says “with the help of Codex (GPT-6 Astra and GPT 6.1 Sol), you can once again play Peggle on any modern iOS device!” And the repos are upfront about authorship: “Outside of this README and Releases release notes, most things were written by an AI agent.”
McDonald also published the playbook. The respring-skill repo, posted October 25, is an agent skill for doing this to other games, and its case-studies file reads like a lab notebook. “Chuzzle recreation reproduced ordinary matching but lost original experience; user rejected it.” Another line: “Doubling Chuzzle update frequency doubled game speed.” On Peggle, “Broad AOT was paused.” The skill itself “does not include an emulator, automatic converter, game binaries.”
Rights stay where they were. The PopCap and EA content isn’t relicensed, and the project says it isn’t affiliated with either.
People have wanted Peggle back since iOS 11. What kept it away was hours of translating instruction sets and stubbing out frameworks one missing call at a time, and an agent will sit through that without complaining. The judgment calls, like rejecting a Chuzzle that played right and felt wrong, still came from the person who loved the game.
Seven games is a start. The skill repo is public, so the open question is which abandoned 32-bit game somebody points it at next, and whether a publisher notices before the eighth one ships.