You can now port Switch games to Mac and iOS with nxnative

It's been a turbulent few weeks in the game porting space. We've seen gaming worlds smashed together, as well as games being statically recompiled for every platform you can imagine. I wouldn't be too shocked to see Mario running on a Samsung fridge before too long. Today though we're taking a look at the often neglected Apple side of the fence with a pretty impressive project in nxnative.

At its core, nxnative is a script that'll take your game dumps and updates and convert them into native code capable of running on your iOS and MacOS devices. The readme stresses that this is not emulation, instead rebuilding the Switch's graphics on Metal. This is particularly notable for iOS where JIT compilation is unavailable, making higher end emulation as a whole significantly more challenging.

To put it to the test myself, I fired up my Switch Lite and dumped Pokemon Brilliant Diamond, along with its 1.3.0 update and the system's prod.keys. With this, I was able to get an IPA file installed on my iPhone Duo within an hour. Putting it into Claude after that, I was able to have it adapt the previously-existing ultrawide mod to perfectly support the more obscure aspect ratio of the inner screen. It's worth noting that even without these finishing touches though, the game was perfectly playable both at 60fps and a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Though no specific AI disclosure is provided, it should be noted that Claude is listed as a contributor to this project, with a thorough AGENTS.md file for AI agents to use.

The project's readme shows an extensive list of tested titles. Those wanting to try this for themselves will need to bring their own game files, as well as keys to decrypt them. To the best of my knowledge, you'll also need a system running MacOS to be able to build the app, even if you're just wanting to play on your phone.


Going beyond Switch games, I do want to additionally mention a tweet from Will Faust, claiming to have gotten their dump of Mario Kart World running on MacOS using a fork of nxnative.


According to the above Discord discussion, this was an AI-driven proof of concept, with the yellow tint being a compositor bug that's since been fixed. No further information is available at the time of writing, nor whether they plan to share this fork.

GitHub Repo