Nintendo Switch emulators

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Revision as of 14:24, 25 October 2020 by 162.158.165.227 (talk) (Emulators)
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Nintendo Switch
Nintendo-switch.png
Switchdocked.png
The Switch in its two forms, portable (above) and docked (below).
Developer Nintendo
Type Home video game console
Generation Eighth generation
Release date 2017
Predecessor Wii U
Emulated ~

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 3.

Emulators

Name Platform(s) Latest Version Active Recommended
PC / x86
yuzu Windows Linux Nightly ~
Ryujinx Windows Linux macOS Nightly ~
NSEmu Windows Git
SphiNX Windows ✗ (WIP)
Mephisto Linux macOS v1.2.1, Git
CageTheUnicorn Windows Linux macOS FreeBSD Git
Mobile / ARM
Egg NS Android 1.0.4
Skyline Android 0.3
yuzu (compatibility)
An open-source emulator made by many of Citra's developers. As it is a hard fork of Citra it shares many of its traits, namely cross-platform support and the use of OpenGL (though unlike Citra it also supports Vulkan). Many 2D games now render graphics properly and at good speeds; many 3D games are playable. This emulator currently offers early access builds to $5/month Patreon subscribers which allows them to utilize new features prior to their eventual release on the mainline build. One of yuzu's notable features is its disk-based shader cache for OpenGL, negating the need to compile shaders on the fly on every boot.
Ryujinx (compatibility)
An open-source emulator that's programmed in C#. Most 2D games are now booting and running at comfortable speeds and many 3D games are playable. It also supports resolution upscaling to 4K and beyond; custom upscaling/downscaling ratios are supported. Unlike yuzu, Ryujinx does not yet have a disk-based shader cache, making the first few moments of gameplay suffer from stutters in certain games. Also unlike yuzu, Ryujinx does not offer packaged early access builds; however work-in-progress features can still be tested by using Appveyor builds or building locally from unmerged pull requests. Separately, Ryujinx has released a closed source LDN-enabled preview build supporting local wireless multiplayer across the internet.
SphiNX
A closed-source emulator that was announced & released in September 2018. It was shown booting some homebrews as well as the title screen of one commercial game. The project appears to be dead at this time, with no known updates in over two years.
Skyline
An open-source compatibility layer for ARMv8 Android devices. For the sake of convenience, the team bills the app as an emulator, but it functionally works like Wine, running almost all of the original code on bare metal except for what interfaces with the rest of the system. At the moment Skyline does not have any graphical output, but some games do boot with audio only.
Egg NS
Claimed the first spot in getting games running on Android. 81 titles are purported to work, and the rest are either not working or assumed to fail. There is significant controversy surrounding this emulator for the following reasons: the current version lacks any onscreen buttons and instead requires users to purchase a specific controller; it expects to run on a high-end device within the ballpark of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855/855+/865/865+; it was discovered to have violated GPLv2 licensing requirements by using code from yuzu in a disallowed manner.

References