I have always been very fascinated by emulators and their ability to run and simulate the hardware of another device on your PC - I am still amazed by the Dolphin emulator which allows you to play Nintendo Wii and Gamecube games on your PC and which keeps games like Mario Kart Wii alive with WiiMMFi even after official servers have been shut down. I’m likewise a huge fan of CEMU and RPCS3 and have played games on both.
BSoD Gaming#
Back in school I was a huge fan of BSoD Gaming, who kept making excellent videos on the topic of emulation, how to setup emulators and what kind of progress has been done as of late. I feel extremely nostalgic for this progress video because it shows just how much passion and expertise has flown into the creation of the Yuzu Emulator.
It’s really a shame that BSoD Gaming has stopped posting videos since 2022 likely because of Nintendo, because I loved his style of opening videos and it influenced my own (now deleted) youtube channel Sciscope, where I would start the video with “Hi guys and welcome-a-back to the channel”.
The Yuzu emulator has had an incredible development history, democratising the access of Nintendo Switch emulation to less powerful computers, Linux and Android, and having consistently high performance boosts. The progress is nothing short of amazing. There were even community servers for games supporting LAN play.
The shutdown of Yuzu#
Even though Yuzu is an open-source project, Nintendo sued Yuzu and Citra on grounds of facilitating piracy, which resulted in the closure of the two projects in March 2024.
I find this really saddening, because years of amazing reverse engineering were just discontinued. There were many forks, such as Suyu and Sodachi (and Citron for the 3DS), but they weren’t really developed much further - though Sudachi is still receiving updates. New emulators are now emerging such as the Eden emulator, but they have a long way to go to reach the level of Yuzu and I don’t believe that Nintendo will allow that to happen any time soon, since most Switch 1 games will also be playable on the Switch 2.
Ryujinx was another major Switch emulator, though implemented in C# and geared towards higher performance PCs, but it too was shutdown on Nintendo’s request not long thereafter.
Switch emulation is a mess right now, but following the progress was extremely inspiring - it made me write my own emulators - and makes me feel very nostalgic for the old times when Yuzu was a big thing 😊
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