If you’ve already been following The Nerd Mag, we covered some of the emulators that have been working on the Nintendo Switch, opening possibilities to more and more retro and early 2000’s consoles to somehow make use of the hardware capabilities of the Nintendo Switch. We discussed various consoles including NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA and more fully functioning on the Switch at full speed. You can actually play the classic DOOM on it provided you have the homebrew installed. Now we’ll be looking at more developments regarding Nintendo Switch Hacking, Emulators and Homebrew Working Update.
NVIDIA Shield and GameCube Emulation
In early December of 2017, Nintendo announced that NVIDIA shied users will be able to play Wii and GameCube games on the device, raising curious questions as to why specific models available only in China were able to do this?
Twitch user pheenoh actually imported said Shield and played the entire game and did some glitch testing and it turns out that the game is running smoothly and without any crashes or issues. What’s interesting to note here, is that there were 2 notorious consistent game crashes on the original GC did not crash the game on the Shield, these 2 crashes were recently fixed in the Dolphin Emulator as well, raising questions if these fixes are in fact the work of an emulator. You can watch the stream here.
Further research on the APK from the shield revealed that the game for in fact was running on an emulator, the most interesting thing to note here is that the Shield has a very similar architecture to the Switch, both devices share the Tegra X1 chip powered by NVIDIA.
More details can be read here.
Now while none of this confirms that the Switch has a working emulator for GameCube, but it shows us that there is a definite possibility for such an emulator to be created. There are already so many emulators available for the Nintendo Switch, the GameCube, which is a Nintendo console, could very well be emulated for the Switch soon.
Nintendo Switch Hacking and Emulators
We already covered the working consoles on Nintendo Switch in detail and you can see the extensive detail here. RetroArch team, Team Xecuter, and fail0verflow have been working on the emulation and Team Xecuter are actually working on a physical modchip for the Switch as well.
Cores currently available on the Switch:
- Snes9x 2010 (SNES)
- Snes9x (SNES)
- FCEUMM (NES)
- Virtual Jaguar (Jaguar)
- VBA Next (GB, GBC, GBA)
- Picodrive (Genesis, MegaDrive, Master System, 32x, Sega CD)
- Handy (Atari Lynx)
- Yabause (Saturn) [Slow]
- FBA Alpha [Slow]
Also, Cheats are working for the RetroArch cores available as of January 14th, 2018.
For a more detailed overview of RetroArch’s progress, check the link here
Nintendo Switch Hacking Firmware Required
The current hacks run on firmware version 3.0, there is nothing yet available for 4.x but obviously, progress is being made and according to Team Xecuter they are releasing a modchip soon which is supposed to be version-independent.
fail0verflow has shown that they have a working hack as well.
We made a nice scroller for Switch 🙂 pic.twitter.com/kUWTVMQf8s
— fail0verflow (@fail0verflow) January 7, 2018
Classic DOOM on Nintendo Switch
We know the current generation DOOM is already out on Nintendo Switch, but what would you give to back to playing the classic version of the acclaimed series? Well, you can now play that, on your Switch
Check out the game in action down below
You can get the required files from here
All of this is leading to one thing, which is the possible emulation of even consoles from 2000 era, the GameCube emulation is almost here, further consoles that could be emulated may include even Playstation consoles given the hardware capabilities of Nintendo Switch. What do you think about this? Let us know in the comments below