Wii U Emulation: Cemu 2.0-72 released
I haven’t talked about Cemu, the Wii U emulator, since it went open source more than a year ago. Since 2022, the popular emulator has been chugging along, with automated builds being released on a regular basis on their github. The latest version, 2.0.72, was released yesterday, and is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Exzap, the main developer behind Cemu, and the other folks behind the project, don’t share official changelogs, so we have to dig into the commit messages to see what’s new in every build. At a quick glance, it appears lots of effort has been brought to the Vulkan support of Cemu in the past few months. Since 2.0 was released, Linux support (and SteamDeck) has seen some significant improvements.
What is Cemu
Cemu is a Wii U emulator that’s been around for quite some time allowing you to play the console’s titles on your PC. While the Wii U was a commercial flop, it is worth saying that many popular Switch titles are direct ports of its games with such titles including Mario Kart 8, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and New Super Mario Bros U. This presents the opportunity of emulating these titles on PC, often with graphics packs/mods that provide a much nicer experience, without the pretty high requirements of Switch emulators such as Ryujinx and Yuzu. Thanks to this, the emulator earned a good deal of popularity over the years as even a low-range gaming PC equipped with older cards like the GTX 960 suffices for Mario Kart 8 and many other titles.
According to their official compatibility list, Cemu runs more than half of the Wii U’s library without problems, an an additional 20% might run ok with some glitches. Meaning that overall your experience should be ok for more than 70% of the console’s games.
Cemu 2.0.72 – What’s new
There is no official changelog for Cemu since it went open source in 2022. Looking at the commits over the past months, here’s what we can see at a glance:
- The linux builds have seen some overall improvement and now appear to be a “first class citizen” like MacOS and Windows
- significant performance improvements for MacOS/Linux, including SteamDeck (see https://github.com/cemu-project/Cemu/pull/370)
- Improvements in Vulkan support
- Many translation improvements and fixes
- Documentation improvements on the github/wiki
- Lots of bug fixes and code cleanup
Download Cemu 2.0.72
Source code:
