Crazy progress happening crazy fast. Some people are already porting Switch 2 games to PC via AI recompilation.
Plus, someone earlier shared Mario Kart World running on Switch 1 (albeit buggy and incomplete).
Nice, I want to play the new Ocarina of Time but didn’t want to drop $500 on a new console
I’m so excited for when I can finally play Pokopia
I’m excited for a game preservation perspective. Another generation of games can be preserved? Hell yeah, that’s what I want.
Me too!
Need to find a place to get roms bc I don’t have an s2 or the games to dump though.
Nintendo could release a desktop game launcher/store like the Steam store or the Epic game store. I mean, they could just release their games on Steam, but I get that they don’t want to pay Valve 30%. So they should release their own desktop client so people can play Nintendo first party titles on PC. But, they won’t. So, emulation will continue.
they probably want exclusive content only on thier inefficient switch machines. nintento is pretty stagnant in expanding thier console range.
Nintendo has a lot of extremely obvious areas of improvement that are just objectively better than introducing new titles/features
On one hand, i’ll be very happy if they do that.
On the other hand, they might have kill their own console like Xbox does.
Exactly. Release a cross-platform client. But Nintenwon’t.
The problem with that is, that this makes it less likely to sell consoles. These companies get lot of money from third party games, and they need to sell a lot of consoles. And at this point, exclusivity seems to be the only working strategy for consoles. Do I like it? No. I won’t buy another Nintendo console, stopped doing decades ago. I rather not play those games, or wait until they can be emulated or are de/recompiled.
I played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on Yuzu. Both together I think close to 400 hours. If Nintendo sold the games on PC, even if its their own launcher, I would probably have purchased it.
As Gaben said “Piracy is a service problem”. Unfortunately for Nintendo, if they won’t the people will. I am not a fan of most AI stuff but the whole LLM powered de/recompilation thing this year has been wild to see. I don’t think it has dawned on Nintendo and Sony yet that their castle walls are being torn down and their hardware exclusivity isn’t going to hold like it has in the past.
I see that Microsoft is trying to please the hoards with Xbox labs but it feels like desperation rather than acceptance.
There are really only two console manufacturers left, Sony and Nintendo, and only Nintendo never allows any of their first party titles to come to PC, ever. Not all PS5 exclusives come to PC, but many, if not most, do get ported to PC, at least eventually. Permanent console exclusivity really is a dying practice, as it should be.
It was dying even before emulation/decomps. The amount of Ps5 exclusives after 6 years (in two weeks) is grim at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games
but many, if not most, do get ported to PC, at least eventually.
Not anymore unfortunately, Sony said this year they’ll stop porting their games to PC at all. There might be exceptions to live service games but don’t expect any of their games on PC anymore.
Well, I expect their games on PC, just not ported by Sony.
Valve has entered the chat
While I agree, the “consoles” from Valve are still PCs with an open platform. A “true” console is a closed walled garden, where only they control it (unless hacked off course). The systems they put out are most console like than any PC before, while still remaining the open platform of it. I just don’t call them a game console.
Modern gaming consoles are just PCs with a weird OS and case. It’s not like the days of yore where every console had custom motherboards and infrastructure
When I say “true” console, I’m not speaking about the architecture. As said a true console is locked down in the operating system and eco system. What makes a PC a PC is the open platform and not depending on a single hardware manufacturer and eco system.
I know that you can install Linux and Steam on Playstation 5 and play Steam games native without emulation, because its just PC hardware. Also that’s one of the reasons why on PC we don’t need to emulate everything from the PS5, because it can just run most of the CPU directly.
PC is the endgame. I also wish console exclusivity should stop, but can’t imagine it will. Either they embrace the open platform, or they have a closed walled garden. Either way exclusivity will remain a “problem”, even on PC with different launchers. If we ignore unintended ways to play (emulation, virtualization, recompilation and so on).
Sony doesn’t want their games to come on PC anymore, at least single player games. So while currently its a mixed bag, it will be worse again in future. Thank god Microsoft puts their games on PC too. And Nintendo, well I have no big hope. But I also never thought we would have seen Nintendo first party IP games on smartphones, even single player games. I do not expect the mainline games to be sold on PC anytime soon.
I would love it, if at least those games come to PC. And maybe the emulated games from their subscription service (N64, SNES, Game Boy and so on) could be made available. Maybe their soundtracks and so on. Nintendo wouldn’t lose anything here, just gain, because those games are already available. So it’s not something exclusive to their service.
I think early next year there is going to be a cultural moment in gaming that will be to big to ignore. That being the first team that manages to rip and recompile GTA6 to the PC. It will be the gaming equivalent of before and after the moon landing.
I wonder how popular PC gaming is in Japan, as I believe mobile gaming (phones and handhelds) is huge.
It is becoming pretty big but they fulfill different use cases. A Switch or a phone is great for commute and a PC can’t really replace it yet. Decks are commonly sold out there but it’s a lot bulkier. I’ve been trying using a AYN Thor but that experience might be a bit too unintuitive to the average consumer to set up.
If Nintendo released an Android app, I’d be fine with that.
Closest we can do is Nintendo Today and Mario Run.
You’re right, but Sony seems to be moving away from the PC release strategy now
In most of not all cases, traditional gaming consoles are sold at a loss. A cursory search says that’s true for the switch 2 as well, but I have not investigated with any effort.
It really seems like it would behoove everyone to sell their games on PC, whether that’s their own client or an existing one like Steam. Nintendo will never get a dollar from me because I will never buy their hardware. I would however at least consider buying some of their titles if they were available on Steam. I’m definitely not alone.
Maybe a few.
But let’s stop lying, people mostly emulate because they don’t want to pay.
Or don’t have over 200€ to spend on videogames.
A lot of it can also just being having control of the stuff you purchase. If you have a copy of the game that you control, they cannot take it away from you and you have the ability to emulate it to beyond the restrictions of the original hardware.
True. Im still playing digimon world on my ps1 disk, but i also have an identical rip on my PC if it dies one day.
Also a lot easier to rom hack a file than a disk/console
I don’t want to pay for a console just to play a few exclusive and then have regionlocked store. Not having some great indies like Stardew in my country’s store, and i have to go a great length to buy games, that is not going to happen. I’ll just get a steamdeck or equivalent and emulate the exclusive.
I emulate because Nintendo are cunts and I want to be able to back up my saves
I’d gladly pay, if that were an option. But maybe I’m not like most people.
This is potentially cool but from what I know the source code hasn’t been released so it can’t be fact checked.
Isn’t this it right here? https://github.com/Djihads80/Eglantine
Yeah that’s probably it, a couple days ago when I was looking into this everyone seemed to be using private forks of other projects
I wonder how they did it. As I understand it the way this usually goes is finding a vulnerability but there‘s nothing mentioned. Of course nowadays there‘s a chance it was just vibe coded and the person who submitted it doesn‘t know how it was achieved. Anyway, a first crappy build is the first step of emulating any hardware and now it‘s out. It will only improve from here.
As I understand it the way this usually goes is finding a vulnerability but there‘s nothing mentioned.
It wasn’t mentioned because it was already disclosed and people are already using it, it’s extremely popular. The Switch 2 was jailbroken using SmileBASIC as a userland exploit plus a filesystem exploit for privilege escalation. If the game can run in a jailbroken Switch, you can decrypt and dump it.
Then as far as emulation is concerned, the Switch 2 is just a Switch 1 with a newer Nvidia chip, updating the emulators isn’t that hard.
Well, it was hard enough because it still needed some work and about 18 months to get to a crappy build but yeah, it it was a matter of time. Now it only has to be good and released on Linux. Also just a matter of time.
It was only days from the jailbreak, to dumping games, to these Eden emulator forks. You’re right about the length of the console lifecycle, but the context is a little different.
Well, it was hard enough because it still needed some work and about 18 months to get to a crappy build but yeah
Note how it took months of no progress then mere weeks after the first jailbreak was released. The jailbreak is the innovation here, the emulator itself barely changed to accommodate the Switch 2, relative to the initial work of building the Switch 1 version.
It was thought that the reason Nintendo went after Switch emulators so hard was because the OS/security under the hood of S2 was so similar to S1 that it would make for an easy path toward emulation. Now that we have the first game rips out, looks like there was some truth to that.
You can assume these days any indie/emulation/mod project is using AI pretty heavily behind the scenes.
Is anyone surprised? Switch 2 is very similar to Switch 1, so they don’t need to start from scratch. If Nintendo doesn’t start from scratch, so doesn’t the community. :-)
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Not really? The upside of buying Nintendo games (1st party specifically) and consoles is that they keep their resell value really well. So, if I wanted to, I could sell my Switch 2 right now and get a lot (if not all) of that $400 back, especially since the price for a new one has gone up due to the memory shortage. Same idea for the (1st party) games: I could get a lot of that money that I paid for it on the 2nd hand market. Also, the console was $450 at launch, not $400.
This is true
So what?
Switch 2 owners have been able to play the games all this time already, and they generally play without the kinds of bugs and crashing seen on emulation and recomps early on.
Besides, its not like Nintendo is the best or even least bad game company our there. They don’t even have built in backwards compatibility anymore, you have to subscribe for them, even if you already bought the games multiple times. Im not exactly shedding tears for a corporation over here, especially not Nintendo.
