Earlier today, shockwaves were sent through the Switch emulation scene when the Citron website, GitHub, Gitlab repos, and even the Discord server all vanished.
Last week, Nintendo decided to take a break from counting its cash in order to issue a wave of new DMCA takedown requests for a myriad of Switch emulators. For the most part, these only affected forks on GitHub, but it sparked concern for the big players like Citron, Eden, and Ryubing. Thankfully, while the DMCA requests were submitted, the codebase was being hosted elsewhere, still making those emulators available to download.
At first, many assumed Nintendo had managed to figure out how to get the emulator taken down for good. However, it wasn’t long before details emerged, sharing that it actually had nothing to do with Nintendo. The reason for this happening was initially said to be due to “inner conflicts with the developer team.” A subsequent post on the r/Citron subreddit peeled back the veil just a little bit:
Citron has been discontinued after the recent drama involving eden. To keep a long story short, theres a new .tar file floating around called the citron files. Inside of these are zephyrons full name, location and camilles side of events mirroring the fall of citron post from last year. To add fuel to the fire, scubasteve a verified admin of citron may have been the one adding fuel to this. The files basically summarize every event leading up to camille getting a cease and desist from zephyron due to accepting donations claiming to be the lead developer. Everything died down for a year and now its back again.
u/lockhart1433
This comes at a rather unfortunate time, as the “Pathfinder” update was just released on the first of February. Then, a screenshot on the Citron subreddit teased built-in support for Gamebanana mods. Not to be outdone, one more teaser was shared the next day, showing off a supposed screenshot of Citron running on iOS.
If you didn’t heed Russ’s warning about backing up your favorite emulators and don’t have the latest Citron build, you’re in luck. Another post on the Citron subreddit has the links for both the stable Pathfinder build and the most recent Nightly release.
While all of this was happening, another major change was announced to one of the other prominent Switch emulators. GreemDev confirmed they are “no longer maintaining” the Ryubing project. For the unaware, Ryubing is a fork of Ryujinx, which has been regularly updated with bug fixes and the occasional new feature or two.
Unlike Eden or Citron, the goal wasn’t to push the limits of Switch emulation, but instead, Ryubing is said to be “a maintenance project.” So while GreemDev is leaving the project, at least it’s not being shut down entirely and scrubbed from the internet.
