Recently, releases in the emulation scene have been a bit slow but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any progress going on. On the contrary, there’s been a truckload of progress in Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator, with Super Mario Odyssey slowly becoming more playable, and two popular emulators called NO$GBA and Mupen64Plus also got updated!
Yuzu team make supporting them more appealing and Super Mario Odyssey is becoming playable
Yuzu’s seeing a great deal of progress especially in Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda BotW!
Without a doubt, emulating an 8th generation console such as the Nintendo Switch is no easy feat so, like many other emulation teams, Yuzu team set up a Patreon account for end-users to help them out financially. Up till a few days ago, the only perk of donating to them was exclusive support on Discord but now, they’ve made donating to them more appealing by releasing special Patreon Preview releases for their Patrons similar to Cemu.
The aim of these preview releases is to provide some features earlier to Patreon supporters as opposed to the general public through Nightly/Canary builds. It’s important to note that there is nothing to worry about because Yuzu will remain open-source and the features in these Patreon releases will always end up in publicly available Nightly/Canary builds in a matter of days. To get these preview releases, you have to donate $5 (or more)/month through Patreon and if you want to read more about these releases, you can check out Yuzu’s own blog post on them.
While this new Patreon release business may worry some, the Yuzu team is providing the source code to Patrons so the project’s open-source nature will remain! (Screenshot of Zelda BotW in Yuzu)
Other than Yuzu’s attempts at getting more financial support, it’s also worthy to note recent progress in their emulator.
Among this progress we find:
- Super Mario Odyssey starting to become partially playable with framerates of around 20-40 FPS on their latest Patreon build. VIDEO SOURCE
- Major fixes to Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey according to this tweet
- Super Meat Boy is working better and corrupted graphics are no more which means that it’s playable. VIDEO SOURCE
- Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! seems to be working well on the latest Patreon build although it’s been said that there might be some random crashes. VIDEO SOURCE
NO$GBA 2.9c and Mupen64Plus 2.5.9 released
Nintendo 64 emulation on PCs is pretty mature but as always, there’s room for improvement and so Mupen64Plus 2.5.9 got released!
Other than updates regarding to Yuzu, this week also saw updates to some veteran emulators. One of these is NO$GBA, a GBA/DS emulator, which received an incremental update to version 2.9c which brings about:
- Improvements relating to emulation of the DSi’s WiFi hardware
- Further documentation on the DSi’s WiFi features and some memory ranges
- A warning is now displayed about missing RSA keys if you don’t supply a DSi BIOS
NO$GBA 2.9c is a pretty minor release but if you want to get it, you can always do so by checking out this link and getting the DOS or Windows version; who uses DOS for emulation these days anyway...
Mupen64Plus was updated to version 2.5.9 which is the first official release since April 2015 even though it’s apparently a beta release. According to ‘richard42’, a stable Mupen64Plus version 2.6 will be coming in 1-2 months and this period, only bug fixes will be accepted in the main GitHub branch. Unfortunately, there is no changelog but from what could be gathered, it seems that the major thing that Mupen64Plus brings along is a new Dynarec (essential for good emulator performance) for Windows called Ari64. Other than this, the commit history shows work being done on more accurate CPU emulation, work on ARM64 and x86-64 builds and other updates.
To grab Mupen64Plus 2.5.9 in the hope of some games working better with updates from a period of a little under 3 years, check out this link and make sure you also grab a front-end like m64py to go along with it since the emulator itself doesn’t come with a GUI.
Conclusion
For more information regarding Switch emulation, you should check out Yuzu’s Twitter and Ryujinx’s Twitter since both emulators are seeing progress even though Yuzu’s seeing more progress recently. As usual, it’s important to remember that Switch emulation requires a pretty beefy computer so if your PC isn’t high-end and modern, you should probably not bother much with Switch emulation at least for now as no build, not even the latest Patreon one, can do miracles!
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