After the quick and seemingly sudden deaths of Yuzu and Ryujinx, a new experimental Switch emulator is re-entering active development.
Switch emulation has been Nintendo’s main target for the past few years. Speculation suggests it’s due to the impending Switch 2 release, but Nintendo has always been very hamfisted when it comes to “protecting” its intellectual property.
In the case of Yuzu, Nintendo believed that they were infringing on their copyright, and sued the developers for millions of dollars. To avoid a long legal battle, the developers, —— conceded and adhered to Nintendo’s immediate demands, which included ceasing production on the emulator.
Ryujinx, while slightly different, is said to have faced some sort of legal pressure from Nintendo that ultimately left the main developer feeling as if he should remove the project altogether.
In Comes NxEmu… Again
Now, NxEmu, is taking a stab at emulating the Switch but is doing so with a mindset squared in legality and modularity.
In a blog post announcing the “reboot” of NxEmu after a three-year hiatus, N3xoX1 says, “I’ve considered leveraging what I’ve learned and understood from my experience by modularizing the safe and legal components from Yuzu, such as the CPU, OS, and video.”
Image credit: iFixit
By focusing on the modularity of the needed resources of the emulator, its development can ensure each bit plays along well either each other, but also minimizes the risk of infringing on any possible copyright Nintendo may claim to own.
Nintendo and Emulation
However, as we’ve seen previously, Nintendo is often times willing to sue and force smaller businesses, companies, and developers into long legal battles that eat up funds, forcing them to close down. If Nintendo sees fit, and there is grounds for a case, the tenuous legal battle that ensues could prove costly for N3xo.
Switch emulation is, ironically, one of the most thorough and consistent emulation platforms of the modern era. When PS3 emulation is just gaining some traction, it’s a reminder that the console is two generations out of date. Ryujinx and Yuzu managed to emulate Switch games with over 90% compatibility and would oftentimes see changes that addressed minute differences that made certain games run worse than others.
Hopefully, with a new emulator that focuses on the individual bits of an emulator as opposed to the overall sum of their parts, it can avoid any legal hassle while hopefully approaching a similar level of compatibility as emulators of the past.
If you’re interested in tracking the development of NxEmu, there is a blog directly by its development team used to catalog updates, thought processes, and development. Alongside that, there is also the public GitHub page which houses builds as they become available.
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