Lazuli, a fresh GameCube emulator written in Rust that already boots multiple titles and homebrew, including Super Mario Sunshine, is now available via GitHub. It’s still early days, but this thing is aiming to be a serious competitor to current solutions like Dolphin.
Lazuli is built around a PowerPC JIT compiler using Cranelift, with a separate JIT just for the GameCube’s vertex parsing, plus a wgpu-based renderer, wesl-powered shader generator, and CPAL audio backend. In normal-person terms, it’s leaning hard into modern, cross‑platform tech instead of duct-taping itself directly to one OS’s graphics stack. There are prebuilt binaries for Linux and Windows right now, but because it uses wgpu and Rust, a native macOS build is likely only a matter of time.
The solo dev, vxpm, has been hacking on Lazuli for about six months as a hobby project and says they got their first games running after just over two months of work. Compatibility is still limited, and crashes are common, but the emulator is already far enough along to run multiple commercial games and a growing list of homebrew. The long‑term plan is to turn Lazuli into a full Wii emulator as well.
They’ve also dropped a YouTube video offering a showcase of what Lazuli is currently capable of when trying to emulate Super Mario Sunshine. As you can see, there are some issues with textures, and some definite slowdowns. But hey, it’s not like Rome was built in a day, right?
For people who want something new to tinker with, Lazuli is one to bookmark and watch. It’s open source, actively developed, and clearly built by someone who actually cares about the architecture they’re emulating. Right now, it’s more of a fun science project than a daily driver, but if development keeps this pace, folks might have another capable GameCube (and eventually Wii) option sooner than expected.
Source: GitHub
