And it was just a matter of time. After the successful development of CEMU (Nintento WiiU emulator) and Citra (Nintendo 3DS emulator), there is a new one coming for Nintendo’s latest console, the Nintendo Switch. This emulator is being developed by the same team behind Citra and will be called yuzu.
As the team noted, yuzu is an open-source project, licensed under the GPLv2 (or any later version). This emulator has been designed with portability in mind, with builds available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
“The project was started in spring of 2017 by bunnei, one of the original authors of the popular Citra 3DS emulator, to experiment with and research the Nintendo Switch. Due to the similarities between Switch and 3DS, yuzu was developed as a fork of Citra. This means that it uses the same project architecture, and both emulators benefit from shared improvements. During the early months of development, work was done in private, and progress was slow. However, as Switch reverse-engineering and homebrew development became popular, work on yuzu began to take off as well.”
yuzu currently only emulates a subset of Switch hardware and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. However, yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics.
Those interested can download the first build of this Nintendo Switch emulator from here!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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