Speaking about the possibility of a similar port to iOS, apart from macOS, the developer notes in a reply that “if amework is ever made available on iOS, porting it would be pretty painless I imagine.” The amework is the same framework that initially enabled a developer to successfully virtualize Windows ARM on Apple Silicon, as per The 8-Bit’s reporting. The 8 Bit notes the likely reason that emulating Nintendo Switch games on M1 Macs is even possible and how an emulator could come to iOS and iPadOS.Īpparently, emulating a Switch CPU on Apple Silicon seems to be easy, given that the Switch itself runs on an ARM processor. The developer has also installed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on macOS and is sure to test more titles. As the game begins, though, you can start to see those technical limitations. In the video posted on Twitter you can see Super Mario Odyssey running on macOS. Players can run Egg NS on desktop devices to play Nintendo Switch games, and it brings a different control experience to Switch fans on MacBook and iMac.

In fact, having to use MoltenVK is a dead giveaway: the GPU code is basically being routed from the Switchs NVN API to Vulkan and then to Metal. Nintendo Switch games might come to M1 Macs through Yuzu emulator port Unreal Tournament, Metro Exodus, Yakuza 0, FrostPunk and other games tested on M1 Apple Silicon Macs Stream and play. The implementation is not quite perfect yet due to the technical limitations of the MoltenVK runtime library, which “maps Vulkan to Apple’s Metal graphics framework.” Even with these limitations, the emulation looks very promising. 'Virtualization' implies the author is basically 'fooling' Nintendo Switch games to 'see' Apples M1 CPU/GPU, etc. This emulator aims at providing excellent accuracy and performance, a user-friendly interface, and consistent builds. Developer on Twitter has gotten Nintendo Switch games to run on Apple Silicon Macs. Ryujinx is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator created by gdkchan and written in C.

Nintendo switch emulator mac m1