Yuzu Nintendo Switch Emulator for Linux is on Flathub.
I’ve been playing around with the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator from Flathub.
I was glad to see that they’re packaging the latest version of this.
By itself, the emulator does nothing except complain that it has no firmware or decryption keys for the game, but they do tell you how to dump those out from a console that you own.
So after spending a significant portion of last night updating my switch to the latest firmware and dumping everything I was able to get Yuzu to load some games I own.
When I was reading the release notes for Switch system firmware updates (I had skipped several because it usually has no net access), I noticed that some of them were really just Nintendo adding more “banned words” if you go online.
Probably the best part about using an IRC server or something to talk to other gamers is that Nintendo and Microsoft can’t sit in the middle, listening, and censoring.
I have to say I’m fairly impressed that Yuzu can emulate the Switch, which is a current console that’s for sale, with games on the shelf.
Debian has an older version of Yuzu in Debian package format, but since the upstream pushed updates that makes games work (or work better) as time goes on, you do care what version you get.
That makes this an example of “I don’t usually run Flatpaks, but when I do, it’s normally a video game platform.”
Yuzu itself, which is licensed under the GNU GPLv3, doesn’t do anything except complain that you don’t have the firmware or decryption keys.
Nintendo can’t shut something down when they’re just emulating hardware, and can’t even do that without software.
Overall, I’d say that Yuzu does a good job at figuring out what your system can deal with and setting things like accuracy and graphics settings automatically.
Many games that were not developed for the Switch are ports of things that were on the XBOX 360 and PS3, but even then they have had graphics settings turned down.
Which is understandable, because the Switch is meant to undock and run on a battery, with its own screen, as a portable console.
I’ve noticed that it plays Red Dead Redemption (one of the SD cards I had on the stack of games over by the switch) at between 26-30 fps on my computer.
It should be interesting to see how Yuzu deals with Skyrim. I have the SD card over in the pile of Switch games and it’s actually a very unstable game on the Switch itself.
That being said, the constant updates to the Windows binaries in Steam are very aggravating in Proton and Wine.
Haven’t moved on to anything else yet. The emulator seems stable. It’s a bit of a RAM hog though. I’ve seen it using about 5+ GB sometimes just for itself.
This laptop has 16 GB, plus I use ZRam (compressed RAM device) swap, and the system was hitting 9+ GB used altogether with Yuzu running RDR, the operating system (Debian 12 KDE), Brave with a bunch of tabs and Memory Saver, and then dropping back down to 3.5-4 when I closed Yuzu.
At least I know ZRam on Debian 12 works. It got up to where it was using 3 GB of the swap at one point this morning, which translates to about 5.5-6 GB of RAM that would have been used instead if it wasn’t moved over to the compressed RAM device, which uses ZStd Compression.
I was watching the system monitor in KDE, and looking at ZRam working, and it was reducing the memory consumption of loaded programs, sometimes by up to 2/3rds.
I’d say based on what I’ve seen, that running Yuzu on a 16 GB RAM laptop under Windows 11 would probably make the computer turn into a slideshow and drive the swap file nuts.
Yuzu also seems to have a “chatrooms” feature, some of the rooms are locked, but I haven’t attempted to use this part of the program other than to glance at it.
According to Wikipedia, some new games may eventually have Denuvo DRM on them.
The Switch is getting pretty old in its lifecycle anyway, so the vast majority of games are already going to work on Yuzu at some point, regardless.
One more thing of note. Yuzu supports my Xbox 360 wired controller. I had to remap the buttons. The Switch controller has XYAB buttons too, but they’re on different places.
Putting them to align with the Xbox controlled makes it easier to hit the right button when the game says “Press A” or something, but if you have good muscle memory of the Switch controller, it might be easier to leave it alone.
I’ve been into emulation since I found Gens for the Sega Genesis in the 1990s.
It was one reason why I kept a Windows 98 (gutted of IE+ trash with RoM II) so long.
At the time, the emulator could only work so well on the lowly hardware available then because of limited accuracy and a lot of optimized x86 assembly.
So, today I use Gens-GS for this on Linux. In the mid 2000s I compiled Gens for (32-bit) Linux and packaged it for (broadly) RPM and DEB (static-linked libraries, all going under /opt).
The -GS fork hasn’t seen significant development in years but did a bunch of code cleanup and porting away from assembly to C++.
The older consoles are “just a pile of processors” and didn’t need any proprietary software dumps from the console itself, so they were a lot easier to get going. ⬆