Ryujinx, an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, seeing great progress: Some titles, like Puyo Puyo Tetris, already in-game/playable
It’s pretty mind-blowing how a console that’s barely a year old already has a flourishing homebrew scene, a hardware-based exploit that needs a new hardware revision to be patched and the ability the run game backups. However, what I personally think is the most astonishing thing relating to the Nintendo Switch is that Ryujinx, a Nintendo Switch emulator, can already run some games properly!
What is Ryujinx? What progress has been made?
Puyo Puyo Tetris running somewhat well on Ryujinx. Image from reznoire’s video linked below
Ryujinx is a work-in-progress Nintendo Switch emulator that’s been around since early February 2018. With a team of 6 developers, the lead developer being gdkchan who created gdkGBA, the emulator is seeing some great progress with some games and homebrew running already. Currently, the emulator is capable of running the following:
- Puyo Puyo Tetris, a puzzle game by Sega, gets in-game and is playable albeit somewhat slowly.
- It currently runs at around 15-20FPS on a computer sporting a Core i5-7600K and a GTX 1080
- Sonic Mania is fully playable and runs at 60FPS provided you have adequately performing hardware.
- Tiny Barbarian DX is totally playable and runs at above 60FPS even on hardware that’s not cutting edge (GTX 660)
- Cave Story+ seems to work somewhat well and runs at around 20FPS on modern mid-range hardware
Ryujinx running TetrisSwitch on my 5 year-old mid-range laptop!
- The Binding of Isaac : Afterbirth also runs at around 10-15 FPS (GTX 1080 + Core i5-7600K)
- Other titles such as Stardew Valley, Super Mario Odyssey, One Piece Unlimited World Red Deluxe Edition have got to the main menu
- Some homebrew, such as TetrisSwitch is also working
As always, Nintendo’s consoles are always the first to be emulated as similar things happened with the Nintendo Wii and Dolphin. For years, Nintendo Wii games have been perfectly playable on adequately-specced PCs while consoles of the same generation, like the PS3 and XBOX 360, had to wait years before any significant progress in emulating them was made.
Does this mean I can start emulating Switch games on my PC now?
The answer is yes and no. If you have a high-end PC, you can go grab Ryujinx and try running your own game dumps on it but don’t expect much to run at 60FPS! It must also be mentioned that the dumps have to be extracted and decrypted before attempting to run them with Ryujinx as it doesn’t support running XCI files directly yet.
Yuzu, another open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, is also showing some exciting progress!
For other people, the best thing to do right now is wait and follow Ryujinx’s progress via the links below. The emulator is still in somewhat early stages but at this rate, you may be able to play some games with a good framerate in one/two years if you have a high-end PC!
Furthermore, there’s also Yuzu which is a competing Switch emulator that’s being developed by Citra (3DS emulator) developers so keeping an eye on that is also a good idea!
Conclusion
To keep up to date with the latest developments, simply follow the links below and remember, patience is key here!
Ryujinx website (more info/news) + compatibility list + Discord channel + download link): https://ryujinx.org/
Yuzu (more of the above): https://yuzu-emu.org/
The hyperlinks in the list of games are to YouTube channels that Wololo is not affiliated with in any way. They’re simply meant as proof backing up my claims as I don’t own the games nor the adequate hardware to produce such videos myself. -Aurora
switch is so “weak” in hardware that it can already be emulated? lol
Actually there’s nothing correlated with “weak”, but it’s well documented GPU
You obviously know nothing about emulation. There’s fast and accurate emulation. Look as zsnes versus higan(bsnes). Higan came about for a first release in 2005, and is still being worked on to this day. An emulator for a console that came out 28 years ago. Anyone with assembly experience can get a fast emulator put out quickly, but will contain lots of issues.
I think the main reason Nintendo consoles get emulated first is because there’s more unique games worth preserving. Like in Sony’s case the PS4 only has PC games and games that try too hard to be movies. You can just watch them on youtube, no need to emulate. That’s my 2 cents.
It’s because their hardware architecture has barely changed since the GameCube and as for the switch it’s because there’s tons of documentation freely available from nvidia. It has literally nothing to do with the game library.
“As always, Nintendo’s consoles are always the first to be emulated as similar things happened with the Nintendo Wii and Dolphin. For years, Nintendo Wii games have been perfectly playable on adequately-specced PCs while consoles of the same generation, like the PS3 and XBOX 360, had to wait years before any significant progress in emulating them was made.”
I think the fact that both the PS3 and the XBox360 had more complicated and powerful hardware was a major contributing factor to that.
It’s because their hardware architecture has barely changed since the GameCube and as for the switch it’s because there’s tons of documentation freely available from nvidia. It has literally nothing to do with the game library.
Or maybe the community has more interest in developing tools for emulating those hardware, because ps3 and 360 had fewer games that weren’t already on PC, so it was not a big demand.
We forgot the amazing switch library LOL!!!, how many exclusives? 20?
lol of course the main issue is hardware, PC should be WAY more powerful than emulated console to emulate it right, and for many years there was no such PCs to handle the PS3 beast
The thing is, it isn’t because the PS3 was a “beast”. It is because the PS3 was a weird strange system to make stuff on and now emulate because of the CPU and such in it. PCs from today will be able to emulate the PS3 once more work has been done to optimize the emulation. The only reason it will ever be years is because in most cases it takes years to emulate games well because the code isn’t optimized well enough.
Look at Dolphin and the Gamecube, emulation on that thing was TERRIBLE for a while, then after years of development it can run the games from the system pretty flawlessly even on lesser hardware.
Then there is CEMU (Which is a whole other story since there is speculation on if they used Nintendo’s code from a dev unit or something to make it run better.), with the Wii U running terribly until suddenly *boom* now with a certain level of hardware you can run multiple high regarded Wii U games at full FPS without any issue to usually be seen.
Point is, PS3 wasn’t a beast it just has a really complicated CPU and stuff that causes working on emulating it really hard to do until future when tons of development is done.
Is the anniversary Nintendo ceo golf or cart or suprise game on low firmware allso emulatable?
idk. but here is my 2 cents worth. switch is basically a whole new level of experience at the hardware level. i think people buy it for that not the graphical experience. dont think it would be fun playing on mouse, keyboard or normal joystick. you just wont be switched. haha.
but hats off to the developer. it surely is hard work. 🙂
You are definitely right.
The gimmicks of Nintendo, whether you like them or not, are part of the experience.
I’m a fanatic of trauma center on DS and even bought the console several times just to keep this experience at hand. You CAN’T emulate this game, the mouse feels way too awkward.
The NX is for experiencing home console games on the go, while my VITA is dedicated to project diva and P4DAN in public transports. You don’t emulate that.
“Yuzu which is a competing Switch emulator” They are in friendly competition and have actually shared technical knowledge, though it is likely it is more Ryujinx helping out the citra people.
From Yuzu’s blog https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/first-games-are-running/
“Special thanks to gdkchan and Ryujinx, as without collaboration, this wouldn’t have been possible.”
It’s been barely a year and we already have CFW, piracy and now two working emulators. Nintendo is getting absolutely destroyed this gen.
You do know the Switch released March 3rd 2017 right? That makes it 1 and 1/4th of a year, not “barely a year”.
But yeah NVIDIA is sc*** them over by having a chipset that is well documented on, and Nintendo got sc*** by agreeing to have a chipset that is well documented on.
RIP Nintendo Switch 2017-2018?