If you thought Nintendo was annoyed about original Switch emulation, we can only imagine how the company must feel about Switch 2 emulation. Over the past month or so, an exploit was discovered, allowing users to hack Nintendo’s latest console. This obviously has opened the floodgates, especially since the community has since shared that it’s possible to dump Switch 2 games and files.
This is particularly interesting, as we’ve seen a recent explosion in AI-assisted (or outright created) tools that turns Switch games into native, or near-native ports. One recent example comes from @willfaustcuber, who was able to get Mario Kart World running on their iPhone 18 Pro and Mac.
Unfortunately, the original videos have been pulled due to a copyright claim, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. As for performance, Faust shares that games “should barely run on 8GB phones like the iPhone 16.” Logically, it shouldn’t pose as much of an issue when it comes to the higher-end iPhone models that feature 12GB of RAM.
Faust details that they were able to get MKW running on both platforms courtesy of a forked (and private) NXNative build. For the unaware, NXNative is recently-released command line tool that takes the original game files and prod.key and recompiles the files into an installable IPA file for iOS and iPadOS. It also does the same for macOS, with a minimal tweak to the compilation script.
For the time being, this remains a personal project for Faust, however, considering how much we’re seeing AI used in the ever-growing swath of game ports and emulation, I suspect it won’t be long before a publicly-available option is made available.
