Developer Successfully Emulates Nintendo Switch Games on M1 Mac

[kiranmk2]

One problem. Nintendo is very much a Japanese company. I don’t ever see them selling to an American company. Even for billions.

They are a public Japanese company - if the shareholders vote for a deal it will happen. I'm sure Apple would let Nintendo go about most buisiness as usual (game design, controller design etc) and just act as their chip / OS supplier.

The Switch is already very Apple-like with the dock and portable modes. Imagine being able to play a game on your Apple TV and then transferring from where you left off on an iPad (or iPhone) with the controllers seemlessly syncing debetween devices (like the airpods do). Spacial audio would enable surround sound on the go too.

Unlikely for a buy-out to happen now as the market cap of Nintendo is too high (~$74bn) - it was ~$11.5bn back in 2015 which was the time to do this.

 

[djphat2000]

Why waste time with that when you should be working at getting Goldeneye to run on it??

OH HELL YES!

 

[B4U]

Yeah, but they have no legal basis for a claim unless an emulator like this somehow includes Nintendo's proprietary code in it.

This is how most emulators get away with it. They practically don't contain any code that belongs to the original hardware (i.e.: no BIOS or firmware). You'll have to provide the BIOS or firmware that you backup from a real device that you own in order to run the emulator in the first place.

Well, it seems like you have forgotten something important though.
Nintendo owns the Mario franchise copyright.
Remember the story about that homebrew Princess Peach game called Peach's Untold Tale?

 

[bill-p]

Well, it seems like you have forgotten something important though.
Nintendo owns the Mario franchise copyright.
Remember the story about that homebrew Princess Peach game called Peach's Untold Tale?

Yeah, but executing, running, and taking screenshots of an unmodified piece of software that you own is legal.

Writing code and stories about a copyrighted character is not legal.

There's a clear distinction.

 

[B4U]

Yeah, but executing, running, and taking screenshots of an unmodified piece of software that you own is legal.

Writing code and stories about a copyrighted character is not legal.

There's a clear distinction.

The legal letter will still come soon enough, knowing it is Nintendo.

 

[bill-p]

The legal letter will still come soon enough, knowing it is Nintendo.

No, it won't. Emulators have existed for all of the other Nintendo systems and none of these emulators have received a letter.

I should know. I helped write at least one of them.

There is no legal basis for Nintendo to claim anything in this letter. Again, we are not infringing on any of their copyrighted materials. Furthermore, I do own all of the Nintendo systems I wrote emulators for. I didn't contribute to Yuzu but I also own a Switch and multiple games for it.

Please don't confuse homebrew games with a system emulator. They are fundamentally different things.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Correct - that's where the Dolphin emulator gets its name from. It's also where the ship in Pikmin and the island in Sunshine got their names from.

I hand’t know about Pikmin and Mario Sunshine Island, the latter I played endlessly with my son yet completely didn’t recall the island name.

Question:
Is Metroid Prime 3, Prime Echoes available for download to play on Switch without any tweaking or hacking etc? Is it a game needing to be saved on MicroSD? I don’t have a switch so I’m unsure.

Thanks.

 

[ackmondual]

Would love to play Breath of the Wild and the upcoming sequel without having to buy a switch...

I've seen someone play BotW emulated on a Windows PC. The guy had a solid specs, but was able to get it to run smoothly. And, there are save states!

 

[dukebound85]

surprised MR is advocating emulation that is not authorized by Nintendo

 

[ErikGrim]

As far as I know, Yuzu actually has an ARM dynamic recompiler to achieve what it does, and it also has to emulate the sound processor and GPU separately. If the author of this build of it just took the code as/is, apply MoltenVK, fix some UI stuffs, and compile, then chances are... this is still "emulation", not "virtualization".

"Virtualization" implies the author is basically "fooling" Nintendo Switch games to "see" Apple's M1 CPU/GPU, etc... but I don't think that's the case at all. In fact, having to use MoltenVK is a dead giveaway: the GPU code is basically being routed from the Switch's NVN API to Vulkan and then to Metal.

- Archives Page 1 | NVIDIA Blog

blogs.nvidia.com

CPU code is probably being recompiled to... ARM64. Note that M1 does not support ARM 32-bit mode at all, but the Cortex-A57 in the nVidia Tegra X1 does. I'm not sure if the Switch even has any 32-bit calls, but... Yuzu does include ARM 32-bit recompiler in its code.

TL;DR: I think this is still emulation, and if my knowledge of Yuzu's performance is still "up to date", it means that this runs at probably like... 10fps at most.

Except she did swap out the decompiler for pure virtualization using the hypervisor.framework.

 

[ErikGrim]

He's now on Nintendo hitlist.

* She

 

[Picklefoot]

As far as I know, Yuzu actually has an ARM dynamic recompiler to achieve what it does, and it also has to emulate the sound processor and GPU separately. If the author of this build of it just took the code as/is, apply MoltenVK, fix some UI stuffs, and compile, then chances are... this is still "emulation", not "virtualization".

"Virtualization" implies the author is basically "fooling" Nintendo Switch games to "see" Apple's M1 CPU/GPU, etc... but I don't think that's the case at all. In fact, having to use MoltenVK is a dead giveaway: the GPU code is basically being routed from the Switch's NVN API to Vulkan and then to Metal.

- Archives Page 1 | NVIDIA Blog

blogs.nvidia.com

CPU code is probably being recompiled to... ARM64. Note that M1 does not support ARM 32-bit mode at all, but the Cortex-A57 in the nVidia Tegra X1 does. I'm not sure if the Switch even has any 32-bit calls, but... Yuzu does include ARM 32-bit recompiler in its code.

TL;DR: I think this is still emulation, and if my knowledge of Yuzu's performance is still "up to date", it means that this runs at probably like... 10fps at most.

The author explains that the CPU part of Yuzu is being virtualized through hypervisor

As far as I know, Yuzu actually has an ARM dynamic recompiler to achieve what it does, and it also has to emulate the sound processor and GPU separately. If the author of this build of it just took the code as/is, apply MoltenVK, fix some UI stuffs, and compile, then chances are... this is still "emulation", not "virtualization".

"Virtualization" implies the author is basically "fooling" Nintendo Switch games to "see" Apple's M1 CPU/GPU, etc... but I don't think that's the case at all. In fact, having to use MoltenVK is a dead giveaway: the GPU code is basically being routed from the Switch's NVN API to Vulkan and then to Metal.

- Archives Page 1 | NVIDIA Blog

blogs.nvidia.com

CPU code is probably being recompiled to... ARM64. Note that M1 does not support ARM 32-bit mode at all, but the Cortex-A57 in the nVidia Tegra X1 does. I'm not sure if the Switch even has any 32-bit calls, but... Yuzu does include ARM 32-bit recompiler in its code.

TL;DR: I think this is still emulation, and if my knowledge of Yuzu's performance is still "up to date", it means that this runs at probably like... 10fps at most.

The author says the CPU part is being virtualized through Hypervisor.framework.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1341534686095564801

 

[bill-p]

Except she did swap out the decompiler for pure virtualization using the hypervisor.framework.

View attachment 1699487

Ah, okay. I just read the whole Twitter thread. Makes sense.

Also this confirms my suspicions about arm32 vs arm64 on the Switch:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1341525360467464194

Likely she'll need an arm32 > arm64 translation layer to get more games working. Plus hacks for games that need tighter timings (the Switch runs orders of magnitudes slower than M1). Plus there are differences between NVN and Vulkan as well, and then there are the limitations to MoltenVK. It makes more sense to do a direct NVN -> Metal translation layer.

Doesn't sound like there's little work ahead. I wish her luck.

 

[IG88]

Why waste time with that when you should be working at getting Goldeneye to run on it??

No Oddjob! I said no ****ing Oddjob!!!

 

[B4U]

No, it won't. Emulators have existed for all of the other Nintendo systems and none of these emulators have received a letter.

I should know. I helped write at least one of them.

There is no legal basis for Nintendo to claim anything in this letter. Again, we are not infringing on any of their copyrighted materials. Furthermore, I do own all of the Nintendo systems I wrote emulators for. I didn't contribute to Yuzu but I also own a Switch and multiple games for it.

Please don't confuse homebrew games with a system emulator. They are fundamentally different things.

We shall see.

 

[JordanNZ]

Plus there are differences between NVN and Vulkan as well, and then there are the limitations to MoltenVK. It makes more sense to do a direct NVN -> Metal translation layer.

That's exactly what she's planning on doing. The first step was just getting it up and running, the next is swapping MoltenVK for direct NVN to Metal translation.

 

[TomOSeven]

Nintendo should just release a tightly controlled Switch App on the Mac so you could play their catalogue on ARM Macs. They make most of their money on software and accessories anyways.

 

[ds2000]

Why waste time with that when you should be working at getting Goldeneye to run on it??

A finer point has never been made on this forum

 

[wigby]

That is a lie...facts dont lie, people do.
If that was Apple's goal, by now , macOS would be already like iOS or iPad OS, limited for app store only

Apple’s goals don’t always align with thousand of developers and millions of users’ goals. And iOS users are nothing like Mac users.

 

[mazz0]

That is a lie...facts dont lie, people do.
If that was Apple's goal, by now , macOS would be already like iOS or iPad OS, limited for app store only

Just because they haven't done it yet doesn't mean they won't do it in time. I'm not saying they will, mind you, but the assertion that they won't is not a fact, it's just your prediction, just like the assertion that they will (in the comment you replied to) is that guys prediction.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

So this is not a emulator in the traditional sense. The code is not having to be transformed from one architecture to another. GPU calls might. And of course some code to fool the game into thinking it’s a switch. But the CPU code should be native

That’s not a first, though. Game consoles have used PPC and Intel CPUs before - getting the game code to run on other machines still took time, and we still called it an emulator.

Games are generally developed and tested on computers. Launch titles are being programmed years before the hardware is finalized. Running games on the actual hardware only happens near the end of development.

 

[itsmeaustend]

And within 1 week's time, Nintendo sends cease and desist letter. 🤣
Nintendo is notorious about things like this.

Yuzu has been around for years.

 

[B4U]

Yuzu has been around for years.

and...?
Just because she hasn't received one before, does that mean she will not get one now?

 

[macbookfan]

That’s not a first, though. Game consoles have used PPC and Intel CPUs before - getting the game code to run on other machines still took time, and we still called it an emulator.

Games are generally developed and tested on computers. Launch titles are being programmed years before the hardware is finalized. Running games on the actual hardware only happens near the end of development.

You might still call it an emulator. However that's not technically correct is my point. It's more like virtualization.

 

[bill-p]

That's exactly what she's planning on doing. The first step was just getting it up and running, the next is swapping MoltenVK for direct NVN to Metal translation.

Yeah, after reading her posts, I think a lot of it started to click to me. I'd still love to see the source code on Github, though, to see how she was able to achieve it.

Also, according to her, lacking 32-bit support prevents some games from working at all, and I'm not sure what effect that will have on NVN (do we know for sure it won't make any 32-bit calls?). Plus there may be obscure timing/mapping issues, so she may have much more work to do than it looks.

I do wish her luck, though. I used to try to contribute to a lot of Nintendo emulators in the past... because I'd love to preserve the ability to play some games when the systems are long past their primes. The Switch is still alive and kicking, so I don't think I'll look at emulating it any time soon, but... I do hope her project will bear fruits by the time the Switch is dead.