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In a competitive scene with softmods, modchips, homebrew, and other assorted upcoming releases, the team behind Yuzu, the Nintendo Switch emulator, has also made some significant progress, as well. A video was uploaded by the Yuzu devs on YouTube, showcasing Cave Story booting up, and even getting past the title screen. After the cutscene plays, the emulation hangs and does not go further. After that, they show The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+, which actually manages to boot into a playable segment, which can crash at random. Puyo Puyo Tetris manages to emulate the SEGA logo, but crashes shortly thereafter. All of these games have major graphical issues, but they actually boot, and even run, albeit at very slow speeds.

The Challenge Behind Booting Switch Games
Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and has been a massive reverse-engineering challenge. Led by bunnei and Subv with contributions from ogniK and jroweboy the team slowly chipped away at stopping point after stopping point to finally get us to this milestone. Special thanks to gdkchan and Ryujinx, as without collaboration, this wouldn’t have been possible.

Also, huge thanks to Lioncash and MerryMage, who have been tirelessly working on the ARMv8 JIT that yuzu uses! Without it, we’d still be in the dark ages of interpreted CPU emulation.

While yuzu is built on top of Citra’s kernel infrastructure, a lot of modification had to be done in order to move things over to the Switch’s services. But the main issues all had to do with the Switch’s GPU.

Because it’s a NVIDIA product, some information was able to be gleamed by sifting through the Nouveau source. Some of the more particularly difficult stopping points were Kernel Synchronization Primitives and Shader Decompilation, but there were many more smaller bumps along the way. On top of that, the rest of the emulator had to be brought up to snuff in order to get games to the point where they would boot.

In the end, this is a small first step toward proper emulation of Nintendo’s exciting console/handheld hybrid. None of the games booting are especially stable and emulation is in a very, very early state.

What does yuzu Require?
Right now, most games won’t run, and the games that do run will run incredibly slow and only get so far before encountering issues. We recommend you have as fast of a processor as possible and a GPU that supports OpenGL 4.3 or newer.

The development team states that with this milestone achieved, they plan to get more games booting on the emulator, while also attempting to emulate the Switch's GPU. You can check out their official post on their site, linked in the source below. The Switch scene gets excited with every day that passes! What are your thoughts on this emulator and its progress?

Source

 

[snails1221]

Woah, that was fast

 

[ATofix]

Nifty

 

[leon315]

I hope ninty won't send SWAT at his home...

 

[Taffy]

I now see the wonder of managing to make something finally work

it looks beautiful

beautifully inaccurate, but beautiful nonetheless

 

[RedoLane]

And from that moment, the Switch Emulation scene was born.

 

[MarkDarkness]

A little surprised at how fast this scene is maturing, but then again, it IS one of the most successful gaming systems in history...

 

[BlueFox gui]

i saw this morning
even faster than wii u emulator hehe

 

[souler92]

finally i can emulate my nintendo switch , run homebrew through it emulating windows 95 , wich then emulates macbooc, into that i will emulate gba game POKEMON RED. finaly the true EMULCEPTION is born

 

[APartOfMe]

Whoa. That's insane

 

[orangy57]

I thought this would at least take like four years, how is the scene moving so quick?

 

[Jonna]

i saw this morning
even faster than wii u emulator hehe

Thank you for answering my question before I even asked it, this is what I wondered as soon as I saw this news.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Thank you for answering my question before I even asked it, this is what I wondered as soon as I saw this news.

The Wii U was like 2 1/2 years in, if I remember correctly. And nobody believed that Cemu was legit because it came out of fucking nowhere

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[NintendoPower]

Is this a late April fools joke??

 

[Vieela]

They are making insanely quick progress. Nice!

 

[APartOfMe]

first cave story, than the binding of Issac, than THE WORLD!

 

[BlueFox gui]

first cave story, than the binding of Issac, than THE WORLD!

zelda XD or mayro

 

[Deleted-442439]

Wow, the progress is insane! I can't wait for them to figure out the Tegra API enough to get 3D rendering functional.

 

[Qtis]

I thought this would at least take like four years, how is the scene moving so quick?

Standardish hardware which is very well documented and had been available in the Nvidia shield TV for some time. The ground work doesn't have to start from complete zero as in many other generations (SNES being horrible for custom chips in game carts themselves, etc).

While a big part of the switch is the portability, I wouldn't mind a working emulator for futureproofing the hardware itself

 

[leon315]

A little surprised at how fast this scene is maturing, but then again, it IS one of the most successful gaming systems in history...

DS and WII are the most successful consols in history, no one will ever replace them