Curtis Joe / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Development on the Nintendo Switch emulator NxEmu has restarted after a three-year hiatus.
- It’s not a simple Yuzu fork, although it does borrow some code from the now-defunct emulator.
- The developer is attempting to avoid Yuzu and Ryujinx’s legal vulnerabilities.
Nintendo’s legal team has been on a tear in recent years, shutting down the Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx and scoring a major victory against ROM sharing online. One developer has been taking notes, and with a new strategy to avoid the ire of Nintendo’s lawyers, they’ve restarted development on a new Switch emulator.
Called NxEmu, the emulator first entered development years ago before starting a long hiatus three years ago. At that point the emulator was only capable of running a single commercial game, which is a milestone for any emulator but well behind the capabilities of alternatives like Yuzu. After that, development stopped and it was largely forgotten.
In the intervening years, NxEmu’s developer N3xoX1 has been paying close attention to Nintendo’s strategies for taking down emulators like Yuzu and Ryujinx. The main vulnerability N3xoX1 is seeking to avoid here relates to encryption. Nintendo knows that emulators are technically legal, but bypassing certain protections, or technical restriction measures, likely violates DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)(A). The developer has written an in-depth blog post if you want to learn more about their thoughts on the subject, although it hasn’t been tested in court.
NxEmu will not decrypt games on the fly, potentially avoiding Nintendo’s key legal argument.
To avoid this, NxEmu is taking a different approach. Rather than forking Yuzu, as we’ve seen from Citron and Sudachi, it’s adding only certain elements piece by piece. That means it can leverage the code that optimizes CPU performance, for example, while eliminating the ability to decrypt files on the fly. In other words, you will need to use a separate tool to decrypt games before running them on NxEmu.
However, since the Yuzu case settled out of court, we don’t know if that’s exactly what Nintendo’s lawyers claimed. There may be other legal avenues the company can use to shut down emulation of its hit handheld. With the Switch 2 right around the corner, the company will undoubtedly pull out all the stops.
Of course, this new Switch emulator is still very early in development. You can download version 0.1.0.59 on GitHub today, but it can only run the demo for 2048. The next goal is to have the emulator run a single unencrypted Switch game, but it might be months before any major progress is made.
Still, it’s encouraging to see any progress in Switch emulation. Alongside the advances in PS3 emulation on Android and recompilation efforts, 2025 is shaping up to be an excellent year for emulation fans.