Nintendo Switch emulators

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Revision as of 12:14, 7 February 2018 by 14.195.238.83 (talk) (Add new entry: Ryujinx)
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The Switch console (docked) and its controllers in its grip.

The Nintendo Switch is a ninth-generation console-handheld hybrid gaming platform launched by Nintendo in 2017. It was also known as the Nintendo NX (short for NeXt) during development, and includes motion and touch controls. 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-chip which was also used on a number of Android devices.

A huge vulnerability was discovered 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 they're missing important files to run and even if they were complete, no custom homebrew apps let alone solutions to load unofficial game dumps have been developed yet for the system.

A "debugging emulator" for the Nintendo Switch, Mephisto, popped up not long after. What it does is emulate sysmodules with "no support for graphics, sound, input, or any kind of even remotely performant processing [...] by design". While this project is open-source, it is developed as nothing more than research.

Emulators

THERE ARE NO EMULATORS THAT CAN RUN COMMERCIAL GAMES PLAYABLY YET.

Name Operating System(s) Latest Version Active Recommended
yuzu Windows, macOS, Linux Nightly
Ryujinx Windows Git

yuzu is made by the same developers of the Citra team Some homebrew demos can be run properly but it's still in preliminary state and CANNOT run commercial games yet.

Ryujinx is a Switch emulator written in C#. Some homebrew runs but like yuzu, it can't run commercial games yet.