Today, Nintendo’s leading the pack when it comes to hacking & emulation news as we have good news on both the Wii U and the Switch front. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the long-awaited Cemu 1.16.0 release that comes with a Vulkan renderer and DragonInjector, a gamecart-sized payload injector that sold out very quickly!

Wii U Emulation: Cemu 1.16.0b is finally out with Vulkan support

Public Announcement of Cemu 1.16.0b’s release on Cemu’s official Discord

For quite some time, the development team behind Cemu has been working on adding support for Vulkan graphical rendering to the emulator. However, due to the complexity of the task and other factors, Vulkan support took a long time to be added to stable builds with around 16 WIP builds of Cemu 1.16.0 being released for Patreon supporters while the Cemu 1.15.x branch kept seeing regular updates for the general public.

As a result, the addition of Vulkan support to Cemu became a bit of a running joke in the emulation community especially after Yuzu (Switch emulator) gained a Vulkan renderer of its own with some questioning whether it’ll ever see a public release. Now, the wait is finally over and Cemu 1.16.0 has finally reached a stable state with a Patreon release on December 13/14 (depending on your time zone) and a public release in just 4 days on the 20th of December!

Cemu allows you to play many Wii U titles like Zelda BotW with good results! (Image Source)

For those who aren’t in on the Vulkan trend, the addition of a Vulkan rendering backend is a big thing because in other emulators, such a backend usually offers better performance over OpenGL rendering backends especially on AMD GPUs. This is because AMD’s OpenGL drivers aren’t as great compared to their Nvidia counterparts and as a result, performance in emulation and games tends to suffer if a Vulkan rendering back end isn’t available.

You may grab Cemu 1.16.0b and support the development behind it by following this link to its Patreon page then donating $5 or more per month. Otherwise, you can wait till Friday to use Cemu 1.16.0b for free from the official download page.

Switch Accessory: DragonInjector put on sale and quickly sells out

If you’re not at home and you need to boot your Switch into hacked mode from RCM, then you’re probably out of luck unless you carry an OTG cable, a USB-A to USB-C cable and a smartphone capable of sending payloads.

DragonInjector is a payload injector that fits into your gamecart slot which got sold out pretty quickly!

To remedy this, many hardware payload senders were born but most, such as the SX Pro, are quite large meaning that you’d need some extra space in order to bring them along with you. However, that’s not the case with DragonInjector as it’s so small that it nicely fits into the Switch’s game cart slot and it even clicks in! This payload injector, by MatinatorX, uses a replaceable CR1612 battery commonly found in wrist watches and allows for more than 4000 boot-ups meaning that you’ll not need to worry about it losing its charge quite often. To use it, you need to store payloads on your Switch’s microSD card in a ‘dragonboot’ folder and it’s possible to switch between 8 different ones through the button found on the unit itself. Furthermore, its firmware is open-source so modifications could easily be made by developers in the community.

Currently, the first batch of 400 DragonInjector v19 units which was put on sale two days ago after being assembled is fully sold out although DragonInjector v20 units (these will probably be molded and have a RGB LED over v19) will eventually be produced following the commercial success of the v19 units.

To read more about this game-cart sized payload injector, check out the DragonInjector website and stay tuned for user reviews of the v19 units. Wololo.net isn’t affiliated with DragonInjector and purchases are to be made at your own risk!

Conclusion

In other news related to emulation, Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn has been fan-translated to English and you may see a video trailer of it here together with a download link for the translation patch files. Moving to iOS-related news, ‘Giraffestock’ of Reddit has been able to get the X11 windowing system to run on iOS 13 with access being available through VNC which could open some interesting possibilities on iPads!