Nintendo Switch emulators
The Switch in its two forms, portable (above) and docked (below). | |
Developer | Nintendo |
---|---|
Type | Hybrid video game console |
Generation | Eighth generation |
Release date | 2017 |
Predecessor | Wii U |
Emulated | ✓ |
- For other emulators that run on Switch hardware, see Emulators on Switch.
The Nintendo Switch is an eighth-generation hybrid gaming console released by Nintendo on March 3, 2017 and retailed for $299.99. During its development, the Switch was known as the NX (short for NeXt or Nintendo "Cross") and was widely speculated up until its announcement. Aside from specialized components unique to the console, the hardware is more or less off-the-shelf, being built around a semi-custom variant of Nvidia's Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip which was also used on a number of Android devices. The Switch contains 4 ARM Cortex-A57 CPUs and 4 ARM Cortex-A53 CPUs running at 1.020 GHz with 4GB of RAM and a proprietary GPU codenamed GM20B.
While Nintendo intended to step up the security of the console, vulnerabilities were still found early on that allowed tons of system files to be dumped, including dumps of games in the form of romfs.istorage archives, an exefs folder, and license files. These game dumps eventually got shared online by scene groups except for their licenses but were missing important files to run and even if they had been completed, there were no custom homebrew apps let alone solutions to load unofficial game dumps for the system. A number of prominent hacking teams (starting with shuffle2 and fail0verflow in collaboration) all came across a new exploit independently of each other that allowed complete control over the system, later officially recognized by Nvidia as CVE-2018-6242.
A "debugging emulator" for the Nintendo Switch, CageTheUnicorn (now Mephisto), popped up not long after the first components were dumped. It was designed to emulate sysmodules with "no support for graphics, sound, input, or any kind of even remotely performant processing [...] by design". A couple of months later, members of both the Citra and Dolphin teams announced the release of their own emulator written in c++, which was capable of booting some homebrew applications; within a couple of weeks yet another emulator named Ryujinx, written in c# by developer gdkchan, was released showing successful booting of commercial Switch games Puyo Puyo Tetris and Sonic Mania.
Emulators
Name | Platform(s) | Latest Version | FLOSS | Active | Recommended | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
PC / x86 | ||||||||||
yuzu | Nightly git |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
Ryujinx | Nightly git |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
NSEmu | git | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ||||||
Mephisto | git | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ||||||
CageTheUnicorn | git | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ||||||
Mobile / ARM | ||||||||||
Skyline | Nightly | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ||||||
Egg NS | 4.0.5 | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ||||||
Horizon Linux | N/A | ✓ | ✓ | ✗
See alsoReferences
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