Wii U emulators

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Nintendo Wii U
Wii U.png
Developer Nintendo
Type Home video game console
Generation Eighth generation
Release date 2012
Discontinued 2017
Predecessor Wii
Successor Nintendo Switch
Emulated

The Wii U is an eighth-generation console released by Nintendo on November 18, 2012 at $349.99. It has a Tri-Core IBM PowerPC CPU at 1.24 GHz with 2GB of RAM. It has a AMD Radeon GPU. It is the first console by Nintendo to output to high definition (HD) resolutions, such as 720p and 1080p. It includes a tablet-like controller, known as the Wii U GamePad, to provide certain additional gameplay. Notably, it can play all Wii games as well as support the Wii Remote controllers for native Wii U games.

Emulators

Name Platform(s) Latest Version Compatibility FLOSS Active Recommended
PC / x86
Cemu Windows 2.0 Medium
Decaf Windows Linux Git Low
Kinnay Linux Git Low

Comparisons

Cemu
A closed-source Wii U emulator created in October 2015 and is regularly updated every 2 to 5 weeks. It can launch or play a lot of commercial games, almost 20% of titles are perfect, 35% playable which sums to 55% of total titles, with varying degrees of glitches.
Decaf
An open-source research project for Wii U emulation. It's able to boot some commercial games.
Kinnay
This emulates the Wii U processors and hardware at the lowest level. It's currently able to emulate all the way through boot1, IOSU and Cafe OS up to the Wii U menu. Written by the main CEMU developer exjam and kinnay.

Dolphin

You might have read about an unofficial branch of Dolphin with Wii U support — but don't get your hopes up. While the PowerPC architecture family in the Wii U is the same as the Wii and GameCube (this fact alone was the reason why Wii emulation was added to Dolphin, originally GameCube-only), this support is nothing more than the file viewer features (region, internal name, various info, list of files and folders inside ISO and a way to extract them) being expanded to Wii U disc images. Nothing has been done on the actual emulation front as far as Dolphin is concerned, and the Dolphin developers have said that they're not going to add Wii U support to Dolphin.