If you’re a gamer or a coder, this is pretty cool.
A developer by the handle of “Sera Tonin Brocious” (or @daeken on Twitter) has managed to get Nintendo Switch games to run on Apple Silicon Macs. While the implementation is not quite perfect yet given the technical limitations of the MoltenVK runtime library, which “maps Vulkan to Apple’s Metal graphics framework,” the results are impressive.
In a demo video posted to Twitter, the developer showed Super Mario Odyssey running on macOS. The developer has also installed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on macOS and is sure to test more titles.
The 8 Bit offered the following commentary as to how this was possible, and what could be used to bring an emulator to iOS and iPadOS:
Apparently, emulating a Switch CPU on Apple Silicon seems to be easy, given that the Switch itself runs on an ARM processor.
Speaking about the possibility of a similar port to iOS, apart from macOS, the developer notes in a reply that “if Hypervisor.framework is ever made available on iOS, porting it would be pretty painless I imagine.” The Hypervisor.framework is the same framework that initially enabled a developer to successfully virtualize Windows ARM on Apple Silicon, as per The 8-Bit’s reporting.
Developers have been experimenting with the M1 Macs since they were released earlier this year, and there’s a ton of interesting projects in the works. While Nintendo tends to take a very litigious anti-emulation stance when it comes to playing their games on alternate platforms or distributing their software or ROMs, this is still an impressive tech demo to say the least.