The Simpsons: Hit & Run — iOS (iPhone / iPad) port

A community port of The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003, Radical Entertainment) to iOS — iPhone and iPad, touch controls.

This is not my project to finish. I'm moving to Android and leaving this here for anyone who wants to take it forward. The hard part — getting a 20-year-old leaked engine to compile, link, and run on iOS with on-screen touch controls — is done. What's left is real-device iteration and polish. If you have a Mac, an iPhone, and a legitimate copy of the game, you can pick this up today. Read PORTING-NOTES.md for the full architecture story; this README is the map.

No game assets are in this repo. You must extract your own from a copy you legitimately own (see Legal).

Done and pushed:

• Source-level port tvOS → iOS. Platform layer (iosplatform, iosmain), native GameController.framework controller backend (ios_controller), premake5.lua retargeted to iphoneos / TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY=1,2 / deployment target 15.0, Info.plist with landscape-only + full-screen. See PORTING-NOTES.md for why RAD_TVOS is still defined on an iOS build (short answer: it's the engine's shared "modern Apple/SDL platform" flag across 100+ files; RAD_IOS is the new narrow flag for what's actually iPhone-specific).
• It compiles and links for iOS. GitHub Actions CI (.github/workflows/build-ios.yml) rebuilds SDL2 / libpng / OpenAL Soft from source against the iphoneos SDK (the vendored .a files are tvOS-tagged and the linker refuses them), fetches a prebuilt iOS FFmpeg 6.1.2 from a release asset, runs xcodebuild for device + simulator, and packages an unsigned SRR2.ipa.
• FFmpeg 6.1.2 for iOS built once via .github/workflows/build-ffmpeg-ios.yml and published as the release asset ffmpeg-ios-6.1.2-arm64 (tag of the same name). --disable-asm plain-C cross-compile, ABI-matched to the vendored headers (avcodec 60 / avformat 60 / avutil 58).
• Touch HUD works on iOS. Control icons load from the app bundle (assets_static/touch_controls/ → copied in by premake postbuild), and four runtime blockers that left the HUD compiled-green-but-dead-on-device were fixed (commit 8a99927): the renderer is now hooked into FrontEndRenderLayer::Render(), the BeginTouchHud2D/GetRenderDimensions Android-only stubs were widened to iOS, the pad-0 controller object is now always created (so mButtonNames exists and touch input resolves to real actions even with no physical gamepad), and InputManager::Update dispatches virtual/touch button changes to mappables via IsInputAvailable().
• App icon + home-screen name ("The Simpsons: Hit & Run") wired via CFBundleIcons / CFBundleDisplayName.
• Sideloadly signing bug fixed. FFmpeg "frameworks" here are static archives, not dylibs; embedding them in Frameworks/ broke code signing. Removed (commit 4764d93).

Built green, shipped an .ipa, signed and sideloaded to a real iPhone with real game assets injected. The app builds. Whether it launches cleanly on a fresh device is the open question — see roadmap item #1.

1. LaunchScreen.storyboard is missing. Info.plist references LaunchScreen by name, but no storyboard exists in the tree (the tvOS repo doesn't ship one either — it's an Xcode-native IB asset, not practical to hand-author). This is the most likely cause of the app closing on launch. First concrete task for anyone picking this up: open the generated project in Xcode, add a launch screen, rebuild, confirm it opens on device.
2. On-device verification of the touch fixes. The four runtime blockers in 8a99927 were fixed blind — no Mac/iPhone was in the loop for the fix. Someone needs to confirm the HUD actually renders and touch actually drives the game, then file concrete, reproducible bugs against what they see.
3. Audio bugs inherited from the tvOS port. NPC speech speed and general audio glitches (carried over from the upstream tracker) — still open.
4. Performance on real hardware. GLES2 fixed-function pipeline; framerate on an actual iPhone is unmeasured. Likely needs tuning for modern devices.
5. Simulator build. Expected to fail at link today — third_party/ libs are device-SDK-only single-platform .a/.framework, no .xcframework simulator slices. Low priority (the device build is the one that matters), but an .xcframework per lib would fix it cleanly.
6. RAD_CONSOLE runtime behavior. Kept defined to match Carlox33's Android build (which also defines it alongside touch), but not verified that the touch-vs-controller menu/UI behavior is correct on iOS specifically.
7. Document a clean sideload walkthrough (AltStore / Sideloadly with a personal Apple ID) end-to-end, for newcomers who've never sideloaded.

If you finish #1 and #2, you have a playable game. Everything after that is polish.

Just want to play? Grab SRR2-unsigned.ipa from the latest release and follow the Asset Injection Guide to add your own game data and sideload. No Mac required.

Push to main (or run the workflow manually) and .github/workflows/build-ios.yml runs on a macos-14 runner: rebuilds the three libs, fetches FFmpeg, generates the Xcode project with premake5, builds for device, and uploads an unsigned SRR2.ipa as an artifact.

First-time setup, one step: trigger .github/workflows/build-ffmpeg-ios.yml once manually (Actions tab → "Build FFmpeg 6.1 for iOS" → Run workflow). It cross-compiles FFmpeg and publishes it as the release asset ffmpeg-ios-6.1.2-arm64. The main build downloads that asset instead of rebuilding FFmpeg every push (FFmpeg cross-compiles are slow). If you skip this, the main build still validates C++/link for everything except FFmpeg and the .ipa won't be complete.

brew install premake5
# drop your legitimately-owned game assets into assets/ (expected layout: see
# the tvOS repo's README — art/, scripts/, movies/, sound/, *.rcf)
premake5 xcode4
open build/SRR2.xcodeproj
# in Xcode: add a LaunchScreen.storyboard, sign with your developer account,
# build & run on your iPhone (GLES2/GameController don't behave identically in
# the Simulator — use a real device)

The touch control icons already ship in assets_static/touch_controls/ and are copied into the bundle by premake's postbuild — you don't need to fetch those.

• No game assets are stored in this repository. You must own a legitimate copy of The Simpsons: Hit & Run and extract your own data. The assets/ folder is gitignored and empty by design.
• The source code is the leaked Radical Entertainment engine (2003) via the ZenoArrows lineage. The Simpsons and all related characters/IP are property of Fox / Disney. This is not ours and this is not for sale.
• Personal / educational use only. Don't distribute the built .ipa with assets baked in, don't put it on the App Store, don't charge for it. Sideload to your own device with your own Apple ID (AltStore / Sideloadly). The .ipa produced by CI is unsigned on purpose.
• If a rights holder asks for this to come down, it comes down. No argument.

This is a fork — I stood on the shoulders of several people who did the hard work before me. All credit where it's due:

• dxcool222 — author of the tvOS (Apple TV) port, the direct base of this project. This whole tree is dxcool222's work retargeted from Apple TV to iPhone/iPad. The platform layer, the native GameController backend, the GLES2/EAGL rendering, the sandboxed file I/O, the premake project, the CI shape — all started here.
• Jveda — primary collaborator on the tvOS port per its original README: camera controls, UI/text scaling, and the long grind of fixing Lisa's School environment. Carried forward unchanged into this iOS tree.
• Carlox33 — author of the Android port. The entire touch-control subsystem (on-screen HUD, SDL2 finger-event input, camera-drag, context/interaction resolvers) and the touch-control button icons shipped under assets_static/touch_controls/ come from this fork. Without Carlox33's work there are no touch controls on iOS, full stop.
• ZenoArrows and the wider community that preserved and circulated the leaked 2003 Radical Entertainment source tree. No source, no port.
• Radical Entertainment — the original engineers who wrote this engine and this game in 2003. Twenty-three years later it still has a community around it because the work was that good. All of this is built on their code.

If I missed anyone, it's an oversight, not a slight — open an issue and I'll add you.

I started this to play Hit & Run on my iPhone. It got further than I expected — a real, buildable, sideloadable iOS port with working touch controls — but I'm moving to Android and won't be maintaining this. If you pick it up, the highest-leverage thing you can do is add the launch screen and test on a real device. Everything else flows from that. Good luck.

This project was made by a Brazilian. 🇧🇷

— cLohan