Emulation: Cemu 1.21.0 publicly released with Vulkan fixes, the ability for graphics packs to use more RAM, file hashing functionality and more!
Nintendo Switch emulation is progressing at a pretty steady pace although a powerful PC is still needed to play most games but for those looking to emulate some popular Switch titles like Mario Kart 8 & Zelda BotW on their less capable PC, Wii U emulation via Cemu is the way to go since these are direct ports!
What is Cemu?
With Cemu, you can play various popular Wii U titles including Mario Kart 8 which runs well even on a GTX 960 & an 8 year old Core i5 CPU!
As hinted by the introduction, Cemu is a Wii U emulator, originally released in late 2015, for PCs running Windows which has been seeing frequent updates since then. In its current form, the emulator can run a wide range of popular titles including Mario Kart 8, Zelda Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Maker even on less powerful PCs making it a viable option for those wishing to emulate newer Nintendo titles. Other than having decent compatibility, the emulator also comes with various features of its own including graphic packs that allow for increasing game resolution, applying anti-aliasing and general mods such as No HUD in Mario Kart 8.
These qualities have effectively made it the de facto Wii U emulator currently on offer and managed to get it over $4,000/monthly by backers on Patreon which get new builds a week earlier together with some extra information, status updates and at times, even preview builds with features not yet available in the release builds.
Cemu 1.21.0 released with improvements across the board
With graphic packs, Wii U games can look much better on PC than on the actual console… and now, they can use more RAM!
Keeping up with their usual release cycle of an update every few weeks, the Cemu folks released Cemu 1.21.0 on the 21st of August but it’s been publicly available for non-Patreon backers only since Friday. This update, which is somewhat minor but still quite welcome, comes with:
- The ability for graphic packs to use more RAM
- This extra RAM is limited to 2GiB (2.14GB) and must be implemented through code patches as heap sizes need to be modified
- Some Vulkan fixes have been put in including proper emulation of the rasterizer disable flag and a fix for a bug in Xenoblade Chronicles X in which there’d be a brightly coloured pixel in the middle of the screen
- It is now possible to export/compare file hashes within the Title Manager and compare them against a Checksum database that users can contribute to
- Negative viewport heights are now supported in both the OpenGL & Vulkan renderers
Conclusion
To grab Cemu 1.21.0, simply follow the link below and you may check the Cemu Wiki for more information on which games are supported. Furthermore, you can support the emulator’s developer on Patreon with $5/monthly (or a tad more depending on the tax in your country) get Early Access to new builds.
Cemu 1.21.0 download link: http://cemu.info/index.html#download
Cemu’s Patreon (donations): https://www.patreon.com/cemu
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