With the Nintendo Switch scene going nuts with the ShofEL2 exploit, a firmware-independent exploit as it depends a hardware issue, emulators that push the system’s boundaries were bound to crop up! Thanks to Linux running on the Switch, it seems that some talented developers have been able to emulate Nintendo’s older home consoles on it!
What do we know?
Late yesterday, Dolphin developer Pierre Bourdon showed off a screenshot of the Nintendo Switch running Zelda Wind Walker, a classic GameCube game, on the Nintendo Switch. A few minutes later, team fail0verflow also confirmed that Dolphin was running on the Switch thanks to a sarcastic tweet telling us that they have a sneak peak of a brand new Zelda game on the Switch.
Running a Chinese language edition of Zelda Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Switch is now a thing (no, it’s not some Chinese rip-off of the Shield tablet!)
It’s important to note that the Nintendo Switch uses the Tegra X1 SoC, a powerful SoC that’s also used in the famous Shield TV. The Shield TV is capable to run some Wii/GameCube games through Dolphin on Android as its SoC is quite powerful so that means that the Switch has a decent chance of being able to run some previous generation games.
How does it run?
Developer Bourdon has stated that Zelda Wind Walker runs at around 20-25FPS with open source drivers and not an awful lot of optimisation.
This is pretty good news since it means that with some optimisations to the GPU driver and perhaps the emulator, you’ll be able to run some Wii/GC games on the Nintendo Switch which makes it a great portable to play these games.
If you’re fine with some frameskip, you may also be able to play some less-demanding Wii/GameCube games since frameskipping could make games run somewhat better with a decent enough result if the
Team fail0verflow have also got Yuzu, the Switch emulator, to run on the… Nintendo Switch so you can emulate the host console (if you’re totally crazy that is!)
frameskip setting isn’t too high!
Conclusion
Obviously, you won’t be running all Wii/GC games at full speed tomorrow and you shouldn’t expect to be able to do that any time soon!
That being said, the future for this hybrid console looks pretty promising and through more work on emulation, it could become the ultimate portable gaming console for retro-game likers!
Pierre Bourdon’s Twitter (further updates): https://twitter.com/delroth_
Fail0verflow’s Twitter (further updates): https://twitter.com/fail0verflow
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