Developer Successfully Emulates Nintendo Switch Games on M1 Mac

Earlier this week, a developer using the pseudonym Sera Tonin Brocious on Twitter successfully managed to emulate Nintendo Switch games on Apple silicon, which they demonstrated by running Super Mario Odyssey on an M1 Mac.

nintendo switch on mac
As noted by The 8-Bit, the developer was able to achieve this feat with the open source Yuzu emulator, which uses Vulkan, a high-performance 3D graphics API. The implementation is not perfect due to limitations of MoltenVK, a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple's Metal graphics framework on macOS and iOS.

The screenshots show Super Mario Odyssey running on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip running macOS 11.0.1. This is possible because the processors in the Nintendo Switch and M1 Macs are both based on Arm architecture.


In a follow-up tweet, the developer said the "big hurdle" is proper Metal support, noting that the current MoltenVK implementation results in "middling performance." And while there are no instructions for the public to try this out yet, it's an exciting accomplishment, and one more example of the new capabilities unleashed by Apple silicon.

Top Rated Comments

ocnitsa Avatar
36 months ago
Why waste time with that when you should be working at getting Goldeneye to run on it??
Score: 55 Votes (Like | Disagree)
NT1440 Avatar
36 months ago

Hardware is fast enough but apple would never allow an emulator in the store. Have fun running benchmarks
Why would it have to be in the store?
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ArtOfWarfare Avatar
36 months ago

I thought Dolphin was GameCube’s code name internally at Nintendo
Correct - that's where the Dolphin emulator gets its name from. It's also where the ship in Pikmin and the island in Sunshine got their names from.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
B4U Avatar
36 months ago
And within 1 week's time, Nintendo sends cease and desist letter. ?
Nintendo is notorious about things like this.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
hawkeye_a Avatar
36 months ago

I love my Switch, altough this is a great accomplishment, i dont ever see myself replacing my switch with my mac. 2 different devices.
What if you could run macOS on your Switch? :eek:
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Minato1990 Avatar
36 months ago
Need to buy one now ASAP
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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