A developer going by the moniker of “Sera Tonin Brocious” on Twitter has successfully managed to emulate Nintendo Switch games on Apple Silicon. The developer proved this by running Super Mario Odyssey on an M1 Mac.
“I’m so fu**ing proud of this. It only gets a few frames into the game before it hits the first MoltenVK limitation, but damn,” tweeted Sera Tonin Brocious.
The 8-Bit reports the developer was able to achieve this feat with the open-source Yuzu emulator, which uses Vulkan, a high-performance 3D graphics API. MoltenVK is a runtime library that maps Vulkan to Apple’s Metal graphics framework on macOS and iOS.
The developer’s screenshots show Super Mario Odyssey running on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip running under macOS 11.0.1. The processors in the Nintendo Switch and M1 Macs are both based on ARM architecture.
https://twitter.com/daeken/status/1340777743244509196
The developer says the “big hurdle” is proper Metal support, noting that the current MoltenVK implementation results in “middling performance.”
While there are no instructions available for the public to try this out, it’s an exciting development for emulation fans everywhere.
