Yeah, the OG Switch being emulated so quickly is kinda an exception to how long it usually takes. I imagine Nintendo is going to make it much harder this time round.
Computer hardware quickly outpaced the PS2 and PS3, but it still took ages for those consoles to receive passable emulation. There's usually more to it than just hardware power.
It won’t take a couple years. It’ll be emulating within 6 months. The real question will be how long will that stay up with the recent Nintendo take-downs.
I have faith but you have to put things into perspective.
Switch Emulation was lucky. Nintendo used off the shelf hardware. The Tegra X1 was widely known and well documtented, Nintendo’s security was perfect but Nvidia forgot too hardware patch their launch units, Nintendos security was ultimately undermined by NVIDIA rushing things out…
Let’s continue…Nintendo signed a legal agreement with the two biggest Switch emu devs about them never touching Nintendo hardware ever again, other scene contributors left the scene out of fear to be sued or because of the toxicity within the emu scene…it leads to a very narrow talent pool who could even develop such an emulator.
So you would basically have to fund your project by yourself, work on it full time snd have Nintendo breathing in your neck. It’s not worth it.
Maybe some very basic games that could have released for switch 1 anyways. Considering they're backwards compatible, there might not be that many unless Nintendo stops licensing new switch 1 games.
Someone needs to develop an emulator though, and most of those guys have disbanded and been deterred. What ever happened to EggNS?
That's not how this works. The steam deck could run switch 2 games natively if they were made for it, but they aren't. It needs to emulate the switch 2.
To emulate a device, you need a computer significantly more powerful than the device you're emulating.
Switch 2 is too similar in power to steam deck for it to realistically emulate it.
That’s not entirely true, the steam deck runs switch 1 far better than the actual system. Switch 2 games do not seems that much more demanding than switch 1 for now
I mean if you can play switch 1 game on it as it seems, architecture must be similar, also Nintendo sued multiple emulators in the running of announcing it adding to the possibility of similarity. Nintendo console also have a pretty big dedicated branch of emulation push by fans.
I guess we'll see, but I'm pretty skeptical. The switch 2's GPU has twice the cores as a steam deck so unless they just don't use that power it sounds pretty unreasonable to me that a steam deck will run switch 2 games well along with the overhead of emulation.
Like, yeah the steam deck runs switch 1 games better than a switch 1... But the switch 2 is running switch 1 games at 4k 60fps and 1440p 60
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u/SecondBottomQuark 23h ago
Did you know you can emulate Nintendo games on a PC or Steam Deck and download cracked copies?