Whether it will have DRM or not is still to be determined.

Can even lower the framerate without sluggish gameplay!

Update: no more crashing with the latest Ryujinx update!

Emulation has come so far. To the point where you can actually play online multiplayer on PC and Steam Deck with Nintendo Switch games, thanks to the LDN version of Ryujinx. A number of benefits come with this, including: no need to cough up $20/year for a Nintendo Switch Online membership higher resolutions than 720p/1080p higher framerates the ability to use controllers outside of joycons, pro controllers, etc. So let’s walk through the process of getting this set up.

I can’t help but chuckle. The newly released Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is apparently suffering from framerate issues. A first-party game. Having framerate issues on native hardware. Good thing we’ve got emulation. Ryujinx is a great choice. In fact, if you want to play online multiplayer on Linux/Windows with Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, it’s possible thanks to the LDN build. We’ve got quite a few goodies in store here with the new 3.

When you’ve heard or looked up the term “Nintendo Switch emulation,” chances are you’ll come across one of two emulators: Ryujinx, and Yuzu. But you’re probably more familiar with the latter, as it tends to be the more popular emulator. After all, Valve themselves showcased Yuzu’s logo on one of their Steam Deck videos, only to quickly take it off after the Internet took the news by storm. However, I like to give the more niche projects the spotlight they deserve.

Denuvo knows how to ruin everything about the digital gaming economy. Just a few months ago they started DRM’ing DLC. Now they’re expanding to emulated Nintendo Switch games. How on earth they’re going to be able to figure that out is beyond me. By preventing piracy on Switch while blocking unauthorized emulations on PC, studios are able to increase their revenue during the game launch window, which is the most important period in regard to monetization.

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.

Since Vulkan has been merged into the mainline Ryujinx build a few days ago, curiosity got to the better of me and I wanted to do a comparison between this and the older OpenGL API. Vulkan, particularly on AMD – and therefore the Steam Deck – supposedly has a huge number of benefits over OpenGL, including faster shader compilation. I tested the following games: Metroid Dread (please be aware there are spoilers here!

Great news for those of you who use Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch emulator. Vulkan is now been merged with the main build! You no longer need to use the PR build. This has been a long time in the making, and I’m not going to go over the tremendous amount of benefits this backend has over OpenGL; you can read the blog post from the Ryujinx team if you want to learn more.