The new Apple computers with Apple Silicon already offer important advantages in all aspects, despite being the first step in that transition in which the company has been involved. But without a doubt there is an issue that many will pay special attention to, because they have managed to emulate the Nintendo Switch games on the new Macs with an M1 processor.
They manage to emulate the Nintendo Switch on the new Macs
For many years, one of the problems for which emulation has not progressed more quickly was due to the lack of power in the equipment. Because emulating one platform on another where architecture is not shared supposes an extra effort with many technical conditions that is not the case to explain here.
However, as many of these devices have been betting on the same architecture, everything has changed rapidly. Hence, for example, it has recently been relatively easy to port RetroArch to Microsoft‘s new Xbox Series X and S. A news that we told you recently and that there would be a new world for the owners of these consoles, because the range of available games was expanded in an exaggerated way.
Well, what we are going to tell you now will surely also attract your attention. With the arrival of the new Apple computers with the Apple Silicon chip , or M1 as most of us know them, there are those who thought that by sharing ARM architecture it could be easier to emulate the games of another console that uses the same type of processors. Exactly, we are talking about the Nintendo Switch.
I’m so proud of this. It only gets a few frames into the game before it hits the first MoltenVK limitation, but damn. pic.twitter.com/NcLIBLWOPz
– Sera Tonin Brocious (@daeken) December 20, 2020
If important advances had already been made for Intel processors, perhaps now that these new M1s with ARM architecture are available, the development of a fully functional emulator with good performance for the Nintendo Switch is even closer . At least that’s what a developer named Sera Tonin Brocious seems to have shown.
Using the open source emulator Yuzu as a base, this developer managed to run Super Mario Odyssey on a MacBook Pro in a virtualized way. And that is where the key lies for that better performance compared to what could be achieved on other platforms. Of course it is not perfect, apparently there are certain limitations in the library that is responsible for translating or assigning the instructions of the Vulkan graphics API to Metal (the graphics technology that Apple has been working on for a long time to improve all the graphics performance of its games , applications, etc.).
However, seeing the rapid development of said emulator to run on a new Mac with M1 Nintendo Switch games, everything suggests that an emulator of this type should not take long to be launched. And yes, nothing better than a Nintendo Switch to play the games of the big N, but surely many after knowing this are already thinking that it could be a good investment to get one of these new Macs.