Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was released yesterday, is currently one of the hottest games for the Switch but its console exclusivity may not last long as it’s already in-game on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator! We’ll also be looking at the public release of Cemu 1.17.4 which brings SD Card support and some Vulkan fixes among other things.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons in-game on Ryujinx!

While development on Ryujinx seemed to have slowed down to a snails-pace for some time, the folks behind it reminded us that they’re still hard at work on it when they showed us Mario Kart 8 Deluxe running pretty well on it earlier this month.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is now in-game on Ryujinx but it’s not playable just yet! (Image from tweet)

Now, they’ve shared some more good news and this time, it’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons running on their emulator with a sentence reading ‘An island vacation is coming soon!’ meaning that the game may become playable in the not-so-distant future.

From a 16 second clip shared on Twitter, the emulator seems to be rendering parts of the game quite well albeit with a framerate hovering between 18-20 FPS meaning that performance still needs to be worked upon. Unlike the time when the Ryujinx team shared a video showing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe running well on the emulator, the specifications of the PC that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is running on haven’t been disclosed so it’s not possible to draw any conclusions on how well the game would perform on the highest-end of PCs available right now.

For more updates, you should follow Ryujinx’s Twitter account & perhaps join their Discord server. You may also support development efforts via Patreon. Download links are found here.

Cemu 1.17.4 released with support for SD Card emulation, Vulkan fixes and more!

For those who are unaware, it’s been possible to emulate many games from the Wii U’s library with good results for quite some time. Contrary to what some believe, the Wii U’s library has numerous titles worth playing such as Mario Kart 8 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild which have since been ported to the Switch and are also perfectly playable on Cemu provided your PC is powerful is powerful enough.

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

Yesterday, Cemu 1.17.4 was released to the public after spending a week as a Patreon exclusive and this somewhat minor update comes with:

• Support for SD card emulation
  • In this implementation, the virtual SD card is always inserted and it’s mapped to the ‘sdcard’ folder found in Cemu’s root directory
• When it comes to the Vulkan renderer, shaders with compile errors no longer crash the emulator and drawcalls are skipped when vertex cache memory runs out rather than crashing the emulator
• Some stability improvements for multi-core recompiler mode
• Some other more technical improvements which can be read about in the change log

You may grab Cemu 1.17.4 from this link and check out compatible games from here. Team Cemu may be supported on Patreon, through which you can access builds a week earlier.

Conclusion

In other emulation news, byuu v4 and higan v110 have been released with improvements primarily relating to PC Engine (TurboGrafix 16) emulation. If you want something to read, you may also be interested in a post describing byuu’s decision to step down for the time being with a new team taking over development of his emulators. RetroArch 1.8.5 is also in the process of being compiled and various platforms such as the PlayStation Vita and Switch have already received their port which can be downloaded from this link!