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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

 

[nmkd]

I agree. There are some really cool games this gen that didn't come out for pc, but if you're not a weeb you won't notice for the most part.

(But being a weeb) I wish games like persona or dragon quest came to PC.

P5 is on PC tho.

Also, there are much more exclusives than weeb games. TLOU, Uncharted, GoW, Horizon...

 

[razielleonhart]

I know it's early but it would be awesome if I could flash a Switch OS to my Nvidia Shield TV in the future.

 

[geodeath]

If they get the emulator to the same level as Dophin it will be funny that a shitty pc will be much better at playing Switch games on a 4K tv than the switch itself lol

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Dolphin is a project that's spanned like 15 years, it's going to take a long time to get virtually any modern emulator to the same level of polish

 

[chirogan]

When the kernel exploit releases for the switch, this emulator will make the world go wild.

 

[x65943]

When the kernel exploit releases for the switch, this emulator will make the world go wild.

What does the kernel exploit have to do with the emulator?

 

[TotalInsanity4]

What does the kernel exploit have to do with the emulator?

Better ability to document system functions

 

[Deleted User]

This is awesome!! The Switch scene is moving so fast!

 

[Quantumcat]

The current title and article make it clear that it's this emulator's first time booting a game. The title isn't my own however, and was changed a few hours after it was written.

I thought the same thing - an improvement to the title could be "Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu runs its first commercial game"

Eg if a news article title was "USA lands first human on the moon" that sounds like the first human ever, not the first human by the USA.

 

[hippy dave]

Actually it sounds like the first human, who would be maybe 3 million years old by this point.

 

[TheMrIron2]

With the fact that the switch basically uses a cut down X1 - a chip heavily documented by Nvidia themselves - along with the fact that these are seasoned emulator developers, as well as the kernel exploit allowing people to debug the system in detail, it's really no surprise it's moving this quick. GPU will probably be partially emulated before the end of this year. In a few years this'll definitely run a bunch of commercial games flawlessly, if Cemu is anything to go by (emulating similarly powered albeit custom hardware)

 

[SonicfanCEMUTesting]

Oh shit, we might play Switch games a little bit sooner than I thought.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

This is really cool

 

[Dontwait00]

Guys, but over the first dumped games of switch (there are like 5 i guess) in late 2017, are allready been overs while now?

 

[nmkd]

Guys, but over the first dumped games of switch (there are like 5 i guess) in late 2017, are allready been overs while now?

What the hell are you trying to say?

Also, there are much more dumps than 5.

 

[Dontwait00]

Also, there are much more dumps than 5.

Ok.