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.

Did you know you can play online multiplayer with Nintendo Switch games on Linux? It’s possible thanks to Ryujinx’s LDN build. Today the LDN build got an update that now enables Vulkan. This means improved performance on AMD and Intel, and all GPU vendors “will enjoy drastically reduced shader compilation stuttering!” Mind you, the last time we saw an update to LDN was back in November, so all the changes made to the main branch since then have made it over to the new 2.

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.

As of Ryujinx version 1.1.112, users can now seamlessly load mods on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with the use of ARCropolis/Skyline. Here’s how to do it. Note: this tutorial is based off of the guide from GameBanana, but specifically tailored to Linux users. TL:DR Get yourself set up with emulating Switch games on Linux with this guide if you haven’t already Download Ryujinx and run it for the first time Download ARCropolis, extract zip to %RYU_DIR%/sdcard/ Download Skyline, extract to %RYU_DIR%/sdcard/atmosphere/contents/01006A800016E000/ Download any mod (plenty of them over on GameBanana), extract them to %RYU_DIR%/sdcard/ultimate/mods/ Launch the game.

Ryujinx – the Nintendo Switch emulator – will no longer be supported on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and even builds of Windows 10 from 2018 and older, beginning June 1st. After that, the emulator won’t even run on those systems. The development team mentioned in their Tweet that “it’s not feasible anymore” to support these versions of Windows. Their reasoning is as follows: Graphics driver updates have ended for these systems.

As the Steam Deck has seemed to launch a new foray of Flatpak-based applications, Ryujinx is the latest to join to crusade. The request was made on the project’s GitHub issue tracker two years ago. Now it’s finally available on Flathub. The announcement was posted just a few hours ago on their Discord channel. You can install Ryujinx on the Steam Deck now with the Discover app. Apparently there’s at least 91 of you who have a Steam Deck and are part of the Ryujinx Discord, so go ahead and give it a shot!

The Ryujinx team has assured us that, despite February being a short 28 days, they paid back an “avalanche of improvements, fixes, additions and ongoing project work.” First thing’s up is Vulkan progress. Check out the video below for a comparison of single-threaded SPIR-V (the shader language for Vulkan) on Super Mario Odyssey vs. multi-threaded: Implementing this obviously wasn’t easy, but looking at the results, it seems the effort really paid off.