The History of Nintendo Switch Emulators

The Nintendo Switch console has been a massive success selling over a 146 Million units. Released on 3 March 2017 it took the world by storm as a handheld console. This home console came with a dock and two Joy-Con controllers allowing it to be portable and you to be able to carry it anywhere.

It has become so popular that it is available in every country around the globe. However, it also sparked a rush for developers to start making modes and software for it! One of the important ones is “Emulators”, to preserve this console’s legacy and also enjoy the games on a different platform, on a PC for example.

Emulators allow other platforms to emulate the operating system and hardware of a console. This way you can enjoy the games of your console on a PC or a Linux gaming device if you have for example a Steam Deck!

Below is a time of events and key milestones around the development of prominent Nintendo Switch emulators over the past 7 years:

History of Nintendo Switch Emulators

2017: Initial Research began

  1. As soon as the Switch was released and open-source developers and gaming enthusiasts got their hands on it they started studying it. They researched its software and hardware with great depth to check how this console was built. They figured out that the operating system powering the Switch is called “Horizon” running FreeBSD based on a proprietary microkernel developed by Nintendo.
  2. Developers now started to reverse-engineer the software and hardware to learn how the games were working and how they interacted with the hardware.

2018: The first two emulators break the ice

  1. As the communities now had just under a year of hands-on with the console and research, two emulators launched: Yuzu and Ryujinx.
  2. Yuzu emulator was developed by the same team that also developed the famous emulator for the Nintendo 3DS system called “Citra”.
  3. Yuzu was first released on 14 January 2018 and became the best Switch emulator out there.
  4. At first release Yuzu was not able to play Switch games without major crashes and graphical glitches but only run some select homebrew applications.
  5. 9 months later in October 2017, Ryujinx was also announced.
  6. Ryujinx’s main focus was providing a more stable Switch emulator with a broader compatibility for Switch titles, it gained a very good reputation in the community as a Yuzu alternative.

2019 to 2020: Improved Switch Games Compatibility and More Features

  1. Yuzu and Ryujinx have been making steady progress in areas including game rendering and playing Nintendo Switch games.
  2. As both emulators were open source and being built in public they shared many features in common and many features including “Shader caching” and “Asynchronous GPU emulation” were introduced in Yuzu and Ryujinx around the same time, only months apart. This heavily benefited both emulators in increasing performance FPS and reducing the stuttering in games.
  3. Popular games and recent releases including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey were playable but required a high-end platform to run as the optimizations were still happening. 

2021: Popularity and Support Increases

  1. Continuous development and bug reports by users helped both of these emulators increase the number of games supported. Stability was also greatly improved and games were running at much better resolutions and FPS.
  2. The community effort helped quite a bit, Yuzu incorporated a feature called “Telemetry” which automatically collected crash data and bug information allowing it to fast-track development and be proactive.
  3. Debugging was made easier for users to collect log files in Yuzu so they can submit the files for the developers to investigate, saving time for them in having to reproduce the bug.
  4. Support for resolution scaling, custom textures and game modding allowed the community to build custom mods and texture packs. These were features that were not available on the original Switch console.

2022 to 2023: Multiplayer and Beyond

  1. Multiplayer was added to Yuzu which allowed users to play local wireless multiplayer. As long as the users were on your local network, you could play whereas the original Switch only allowed users that were sitting close to you.
  2. With the release of SteamDeck, Yuzu and Ryujinx both became compatible with this handheld and later on also worked on RetroArch.
  3. Further advanced features were added including the support for 4K gameplay, again this was not possible on the original console hardware.
  1. In February 2024, Nintendo of America took Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu to court. Yuzu settled with Nintendo and paid a US 2.4 Million fine, it was ordered to take the project down.
  2. Ryujinx also went offline this year around the end of September 2024 with the developer gdkchan not mentioning a clear reason why. There is speculation in the community that he may have been bought out by Nintendo.
  3. Various fork projects of Yuzu, nameplay Suyu, Sudachi and Torzu appear as alternative choices. However, various have already received DMCA requests to be taken down and have not made any/much progress at all.
  4. No current active emulator is available for Switch at the scale Yuzu and Ryujinx were. All the files have been removed from the internet and can’t be found.

Remember: Piracy is harmful to the community. Always seek permission from the copyright owners and authors before you do anything. The only way you can support them is by buying their games and the physical Switch console. Downloading ROMs and other such files is illegal, please don’t do that! Always follow the law.

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