TECH NEWS – One of the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators, still in active development, is coming to Android shortly after Nintendo shut down its rival.

The popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu is now available to download for select Android devices. Its mobile port was released on the Google Play Store on Tuesday. It comes amid Nintendo’s latest emulation action, which has even hit Valve with a DMCA takedown notice for its Steam launch of the Dolphin emulator.

A few weeks earlier, Skyline, a popular Switch emulator for Android, was shut down after its creators learned that using Lockpick_RCM was likely a violation of Nintendo’s copyright.

This tool for dumping Switch encryption keys also halted development in early May following a DMCA takedown notice. The emulation community speculates that the measure was issued in response to an early copy of Tears of the Kingdom being leaked ten days before the game’s May 12 release. However, it has not been confirmed that Nintendo indeed initiated the recall.

It would appear that the Yuzu team has decided to fill the Android-native Switch emulation void left by Skyline. But the timing of the release is probably coincidental. Porting such complex software doesn’t happen overnight. The project’s official website suggests as much. It reveals that the developers have been planning a mobile version of the Switch emulator for some time. Android users who want to use Yuzu to emulate the Nintendo Switch on their smartphones and tablets legally will have to throw away their console decryption keys and game ROMs themselves.

The Switch’s Tegra X1 processor was well above mid-range mobile chips when the hybrid console was released in 2017. Six years later, emulating it on smartphones and tablets still requires some pretty serious hardware. Specifically, the initial mobile build of Yuzu was only tested on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips with Adreno GPUs. For best results, it is recommended to use Snapdragon 800 series chipsets.

Developers suspect that high-end Samsung devices from the past 18 months – using the Exynos 2200 or a newer chip – could also deliver acceptable performance in various games.

However, the Yuzu team has not yet tested this theory. Such smartphones and tablets are only available in a few (mainly European) markets.

Either way, Yuzu’s portable port is still a boon for mobile gaming. It is an essential milestone for emulation in general. Its arrival could help soften the blow to the emulation community this spring. The latter began when Microsoft restricted the use of emulators on the Xbox Series X/S. They continued with the aforementioned problems with Dolphin and Skyline.

Source: Yuzu