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 are not interested in adding Wii U support to Dolphin.