You need to jailbreak the ipad and the path you will tread will be a bit unsupported, but its possible.

https://worthdoingbadly.com/hv/

I've got an M2 iPad Pro, running 16.3.1 and jailbroken with UTM HV. It's very fast, about 96% of the native speed, however you can only use up to 5 and a bit gigabytes of ram before getting terminated. The linux experience isn't too great either. It tends to be quite buggy and crashes a lot, I've tested Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40. Overall, it's cool but too buggy for me to use daily.

It’s great. I’ve been running iDOS regularly on a 3rd-gen iPad Pro, at 26800 cycles (roughly a 486DX4 100Mhz). I can run every DOS game well supported by DOSBox, write in WordPerfect 6.2, install and run Windows 3.1 at full speed, and compile and debug code via Borland C++ 3.1/4.6, or OpenWatcom 2.0. The file system is easily accessible through the Files app, so I can transfer files in and out without tedious mounting of images.

My only (and very minor) complaint is that it relies on the ancient DOSBox-0.74-3, rather than one of the forks with broader support and better emulation of exotic hardware, like DOSBox-X.

With regard to UTM SE, I’ve had mixed results as well. For best results, I recommend installing Windows 95, which was very performant. (Otherwise, keep in mind that the SE stands for ‘Slow Edition’ — really.)

It handled One Must Fall 2097, which needed a high-end 486 or low-end Pentium, just fine. Wing Commander 1 and 2 should be fine. WC3 I'm not entirely sure about, though.

I don have experience with emulation on iPad. But I have been using DosBox (don't have JIT) and FS-UAE (don't have JIT on Apple Silicon) on my M1 Mac mini for several years.

It is more than fast enough to emulate everything perfectly.

Yeah, UTM on iOS without JIT (UTM SE) is about 2-3x slower.

You have to jailbreak for JIT though, which makes things fairly annoying for the actual version of UTM. At least the macOS app is actually quite good lol