Nintendo Switch emulator “Yuzu” announced, generates mixed reactions
A few days ago, the talented hackers behind Citra (3DS emulator) announced they have been working on a Nintendo Switch emulator. Named “Yuzu”, the emulator’s source code is available and making fast progress.
Although Yuzu is currently very far from emulating commercial games (its official intent is to run homebrew games to help with independent development and debugging), the announce has generated mixed reactions.
In particular, many gamers are worried that the emulator could indirectly bring piracy to the platform (or, of its games, on a different platform) and impact Nintendo Switch sales.
However it’s worth remembering at this point that the Nintendo Switch is the fastest selling console in history, in many countries, and that an emulator would probably take a very long time to impact that success in any meaningful way.
From the hacking scene’s perspective, this looks awesome: the emulator’s open source and could indeed help homebrew developers debug their games early on, potentially in a much more comfortable way than having to run code on the actual machine.
But again, the emulator is in its very early stages today, and won’t run much yet. From the project’s readme:
yuzu is a work-in-progress Nintendo Switch emulator. yuzu is an open-source project, licensed under the GPLv2 (or any later version). yuzu has been designed with portability in mind, with builds available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The project was started in spring of 2017 by bunnei, one of the original authors of the popular Citra 3DS emulator, to experiment with and research the Nintendo Switch. Due to the similarities between Switch and 3DS, yuzu was developed as a fork of Citra. This means that it uses the same project architecture, and both emulators benefit from shared improvements. During the early months of development, work was done in private, and progress was slow. However, as Switch reverse-engineering and homebrew development became popular, work on yuzu began to take off as well.
In January of 2018, the yuzu team was formed out of several Citra developers, and the decision was made to release the project publicly. As an emulator, yuzu is in its infancy, and is only currently useful for Switch reverse-engineering and homebrew development.
download and install Yuzu
You’ll need to compile the emulator from source in order to run it. The github page gives very detailed steps on how to build the emulator on multiple platforms including Windows. No doubt that some nightly builds are floating around, but I’m too lazy to look.
There’s also no clear indication of what apps you can run on it for now, although you might want to try vgmoose’s Space Game, which appears a lot in yuzu’s screenshots so far. Adventurous folks might want to try a doom port.
Source: bunnei
Great news!
I don’t know what people fear. The average user’s machine can’t run well emus from last gen consoles… Maybe one day the average machine will perfectly run wiiu,3ds, ps3, maybe vita too, but that will probably be when PS6, xboxyz123 and wii2me2uNu2 will be on the market.
A potato has enough power to run Citra though… and if there was a Vita emulator out there, it probably would too.
Also, a modern computer in the higher spectrum of the mid-range specs (talking about CoffeeLake i5 with GTX 1060 or something along those lines) can emulate the PS3 perfectly (well, by “perfectly” I mean its differences to the console won’t be improved by stronger hardware, but solely by improving the emulator)
It really doesn’t, a notebook can’t run the newest pokémon, you will barely run something like blaster master zero.
“a modern computer in the higher spectrum of the mid-range specs (talking about CoffeeLake i5 with GTX 1060 or something along those lines) “
No, lots of modern computers still look like computers from 10 years ago with slightly more RAM.
That’s because the 3DS *is* a potato. There are literally calculators more powerful than the original 3DS.
lies
i think the problem is… Nintendos “switch console” is the last resort as the WII U failed.. and the gamers, dont want Nintendo to lose the Console wars..
i kinda hope nintendo loses
if playstation and xbox dominate then we can have less censorship (not in a lewd way) and more interesting games
LOL
i hope sony loses so we can have less hentai games
To the people complaining this may bring pirates to the console, c’mon baby, this is Nintendo. The Wii servers where riddled with cheaters, and pirates. If you want a secure console you knew to take your business elsewhere 10 years ago.
^couldn’t agree more man
Is Sony more secure? Homebrew launcher is just released.
The N64 and PS1 both had very early emulation and you could play a fair amount of games very early on, particularly the system sellers. Emulation and piracy don’t kill consoles. Not having it also CERTAINLY DOES NOT save consoles. Or do we need to look closer to the sales of early years PS3 (before the infamous hack and PS Plus turnaround, which is also around when the system was fully hacked) Vita, Gamecube, Xbox One. Those systems really burned through the sales, eh?
The Dreamcast also didn’t die due to piracy. It died due to the PS2, lacking DVD (so games really mattered) and particularly Sega not being able to afford another ad campaign and AAA title push. Sega killed the Dreamcast, and internal memos showed they never expected it to do anything but save face for a few people and not have them go completely out of business.
Piracy only killed the Famicom Disk System.
And since Nintendo made no effort on the hardware front of the Switch, using a completely stock chipset, this was to be expected. The Switch will be the easiest modern console/handheld to emulate.
Neither good or bad. Will probably progress really quickly since it’s familiar hardware… Still prefer to have the console’s portability to an emulator on my pc. It would be preferrable if the console wasn’t portable
Oh great i love to see Switch bombed.. This crappy hardware doesn’t deserve the sales
Just curious, how is its amazing hardware considered crappy to you?
Because is a triggered Sony fanboy. Vita is a flop and Xboxone is selling more than Ps4.
yeah vita is bett -oh wait it’s not. oops
Look forward to the Switch doing everything. From running APKs and Android converted apps, to emluators for the first 4 gen of console games, to all kids of other stuff. Zsnes on Switch, please. (priorities)