While PlayStation & Xbox exclusives take years to become playable on PC, it’s a different story for Nintendo’s since its current home console, the Switch, has been emulated with good results on PC for quite some time. In this article, we’re going to take a quick look at Yuzu’s July 2020 progress report which among other things drops the good news of Paper Mario: The Origami King being playable on the emulator despite it being released less than a month ago!

A summary of Yuzu’s July 2020 Progress Report

As has been the trend lately, the folks working on the Yuzu emulator (a Switch emulator for PC) publish a progress report every month communicating with regular end-users what they have been up to and what it means for them.

Mario Kart 8 & various other titles have received improvements to make them work much better and smoothen over rough edges

Obviously, these progress reports are worth reading on their own but they are quite wordy so a summary in point-form will be given to highlight the most important takeaways from a user PoV:

• Various fixes have been done by Rodrigo, a recurring name in Yuzu development, in order to make Paper Mario: The Origami King playable
  • This title, which is a Nintendo Switch-exclusive, was released on July 17 meaning that it’s not even a month old and it’s received decent reviews in the 7-9/10 range averaging at about an 8
  • Rodrigo’s fixes include a fix to prevent the game from getting stuck when it starts rendering graphics, fixes relating to graphical artifacting and lighting issues.
• The GPU Virtual Memory Manager was rewritten from the ground-up by bunnei which results in various minor yet noticeable graphical issues such as invisible terrain in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe being fixed
• It is now possible to create random and default Miis which allow titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe & New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to be playable
  • One needs to dump system archives from their hacked Switch console through Goldleaf in order to use this feature
• Improvements to the texture cache which help with Zelda: BotW, the implementation of further OpenGL, Vulkan & GLASM extensions and various other graphics-related improvements including fixes for crashes happening with recent Nvidia Linux Vulkan drivers
  

  Some graphical issues (with the weeds) have been fixed in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

  • Project Prometheus, which is effectively multicore emulation support, has been improved especially when it comes to audio
• Support for the GameCube adapter, which is an official accessory by Nintendo, is being implemented by epicboy allowing Smash players to get the original experience
• Various issues relating to DLC installation in batch have been fixed together with issues relating to VFS (Virtual File System) which allows for the auto-save functionality in games such as Luigi’s Mansion 3 to function correctly.
  • Furthermore, the VFS fixes also allow Diablo III: Eternal Collection to get past the EULA screen. Saving issues in Bioshock Triology were also fixed
• Older CPUs and Pentium/Atom chips no longer crash when processing audio as  AVX/AVX2 instruction set usage is no longer forced in Opus which is an audio-related dependency
  • On the topic of CPUs, a performance regression present on AMD Phenom, Ivy Bridge (and older) Intel CPUs and Pentium/Celeron/Atom chips due to these not supporting the FMA instruction set is being researched.
• Per-game configurations, a Midnight Blue theme and some other UI-related improvements have been added
• Various audio improvements have been made by ogniK and async shader support has been added to Vulkan
  • It’s recommended to avoid using asynchronous shaders in OpenGL if using an AMD Radeon GPU

Games which have seen notable improvement

Moving over to the bottom line in progress reports, various games are emulated in a better fashion compared to last month and these include:

• Paper Mario: The Origami King
  

  Fancy playing the latest Paper Mario game on PC? With Yuzu & even Ryujinx, you can!

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
• New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe
• Kirby Star Allies
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Super Mario Odyssey
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2
• Luigi’s Mansion 3
• KATANA KAMI: A Way of the Samurai Story
• Okami HD
• Diablo III: Eternal Collection
• Bioshock Trilogy
• Pokemon Sword and Shield

To see how these titles have been improved, simply check out the progress report and use your browser’s Find function as there are there’s too much to state for a summary article

Conclusion

If you wish to support Yuzu’s development financially and get access to Early Access builds which contain more features together with various performance/accuracy improvements, you may support its team over on Patreon by following the link below. You may also follow them on Twitter for semi-regular updates.

Yuzu July 2020 Progress Report: https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-progress-report-jul-2020/

Yuzu’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam

Yuzu’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yuzuemu

The post Emulation: A quick look at Yuzu’s July 2020 Progress Report – Paper Mario: The Origami King is playable, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe working better and more! appeared first on Wololo.net.