Ryujinx (Switch Emulator) Update (opens in new tab)

This is fairly common in many console emulators, see:

- PS3 (Nvidia RSX): https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/blob/master/rpcs3/Emu/RSX/rsx...

- PS4 (AMD GCN): https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital-qemu/blob/master/hw/ps4...

The hardware is known ahead of time, so console platforms take advantage of that: GPU drivers allocate a context and hand it over to userspace which can do nearly anything it wants with it (abstraction layers are quite thin), and graphics APIs are essentially a 1:1 mapping of the hardware.

Because of that there's little difference between emulating the API or emulating the GPU (the subset of the GPU accessible through the API).

The only major difference I'd say is emulating the entire GPU (including VM, GART/IOMMU, display controller, multi-contexts, etc.) vs just emulating a single GPU context (which feels quite similar to implementing a graphics API).

From the end-user perspective: I see Yuzu and Ryujinx differences as mostly about game compatibility (I keep both around). I personally don't know any feature one has over the other that might drive people to a specific one.

As far as the requirement to own a Switch, it mostly has to do with being able to decrypt games to play them and system OS apps for services they provide to games. If they were to ship these keys or firmware blobs, they'd be at risk of litigation from Nintendo versus providing documentation on how to obtain the keys and firmware legally. Some of the firmware files might be able to be reimplemented in the future depending on patents and the like.

As a side note, the files required to play _can_ be found online, probably by searching the firmware version plus the filename from Yuzu/Ryujinx docs. (The keys are firmware version specific, and I think tools like RyuSAK let you get both keys and firmware, but this definitely isn't the legal way to go about it )

> both still require owning a hacked switch which is quite a barrier to entry

This has not been necessarily the case for years.

There's enough difference in performance and stability it's worth using both if you're into Switch emulation. They can have different performance and bugs for different games. For example, on my hardware Yuzu has a difficult time maintaining a good framerate on Mario Odyssey and it also has an almost half-second input lag with that game. Ryujinx has neither of those problems.

Ryujinx is using C#, which is kind of neat, given that on computing it seems one needs to prove a point to make it clear for others.

.NET is pretty portable. It can run on most popular platforms.

Where would you be running this where you’re also blocked by net support?

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, how much more portable do you want it to be?

They appear to distribute Windows, Linux, and macOS builds. I'm not plugged into the .NET/Mono scene, but the download (the Linux one at least) appears to be an AOT-compiled ELF file, with no dynamic dependencies (well, aside from possibly dlopen()ing things at runtime) on .NET/Mono components. I was able to run it without installing the Mono runtime or any libraries.

.NET is portable, .NET Framework isn't.