Lately, the Switch scene has been a bit quiet but now, it’s back with a bang with somewhat significant updates to four emulators AND support for dynarec in DosBox! Thankfully, the Vita is also directly or indirectly piggy-backing from recent Switch emulation developments as frangar is working on getting DosBox dynarec to work on the Vita.

m4wx gets DosBox dynarec working on the Switch and frangar working on enabling it for the Vita port

Fancy running Windows 9x games on your Switch? Well, you may be able to some of them soon!

While the DosBox emulator is one of the most popular emulators around, the Switch and PSVita ports of it didn’t see as much love as other emulators.

Due to this, dynarec wasn’t working on both these ports but now, m4wx decided to change things a bit and has been to get DosBox’s aarch64 (ARM 64) dynamic recompiler (dynarec) working on the Switch. This means that many more MS-DOS games, such as WarCraft 2 (below) and Settlers 2, run great and performance in Windows 95/98/ME is probably much better which means that some older Windows games may be playable on the Switch!

Switching focus to the PSVita, its DosBox port is also seeing some love as frangar pushed some commits to GitHub relating to dynarec support. As of right now, no official word has been given on the state of DosBox’s dynarec on the Vita but MS-DOS/Windows 9x emulation on the device might get a significant improvement soon!

The Switch builds of DosBox with dynarec aren’t publicly available as of right now and are only available in beta form for Patreon supports of m4wx or rsn8887. That being said, they’ll probably be made available to everybody in the coming days/weeks as both developers are big contributors to the homebrew community.

Cpasjuste’s pNES, pSNES and pFBA all get updated

If you don’t want to use RetroArch, you can use Cpasjuste’s newly updated standalone emulators instead!

If you aren’t a big fan of RetroArch and prefer standalone emulators for the Switch, then you’ve got some updates to install as 3 important emulators have just been updated! These are Cpasjuste’s pNES, pSNES and pFBA, all mature emulators that have been around since last year.

These updates (v3.1) apply to all three emulators and are available for both the Switch and Linux; they include:

• Support for zipped skins so you can have a more organised skins folder and save a bit of space along some other minor updates
  • You may now select the skin of your choice from the main menu
• The save state menu received numerous bug fixes and is now able to return to the main menu when pressing the back button successfully among other things
• On the Switch, you can press the joystick on the left joycon for START and the joystick on the right joycon for SELECT
• The Force_60HZ option is not automatically applied, the auto interpolation options and NeoGeo BIOS selection have been fixed (Included in pFBA only through a separate v3.3 release)

To grab these updated emulators, simply download the ZIP files from this link for the platform you want (Switch/Linux) and enjoy! Make sure you get version 3.3 of pFBA as it’s not included in the pEMU 3.1 release collection.

ScummVM for the Switch updated with USB Mouse/Keyboard support

Now, you can play classics like ‘The Secret Of Monkey Island’ with a mouse on your Switch!

On another note, rsn8887 has released yet another significant update to ScummVM for the Switch which brings about support for USB mice and keyboards.

This which will translate to a more faithful gaming experience and more accurate input as games that can be run in ScummVM are all ‘point and click’ adventure games like Leisure Suit Larry. Rsn8887 notes that not all mice may work and some keyboard/mouse combos don’t work either due to limitations in the Switch’s USB driver so if the mouse you try using doesn’t work, just try another one!

To grab this build of ScummVM (and an updated PSP build), simply follow this link and download the NRO provided.

Conclusion

If the above emulation news isn’t enough, then you’ll be pleased to know m4wx has released a version of Mupen64Plus with the GlideN64 plugin that runs Resident Evil 2 and Star Wars:RS without major issues! As usual, if you encounter any issues report to them to the Issues tab in the GitHub links above and you may also give a few bucks to talented developers mentioned in this article through their Patreon links below (frangar and cpasjuste don’t have a Patreon account).

m4wx’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m4xwdev

rsn8887’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rsn8887

Warcraft 2 running on the Nintendo Switch via #DOSBOX
Utilizing the aarch64 dynarec!@libretro pic.twitter.com/J9rrRnbr2I

— m4xw (@m4xwdev) March 21, 2019