Yuzu (emulator)

Yuzu, stylized as yuzu, is a free and open-source emulator of the Nintendo Switch. Yuzu was announced to be in development on the 14th of January 2018, 10 months after the Nintendo Switch came out. It is developed in C++.

The emulator was made by the developers of the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra. Both programs use a lot of the same code. At first, Yuzu only supported test programs and homebrew, but as of July 2019, a small amount of games work without any issues. A list of games that work with Yuzu is updated on Yuzu's official website.

On the 26th of February 2024, the Yuzu Emulator officially went down because of Nintendo suing them for 2.4 million dollars. In response, Tropic Haze LLC deleted its GitHub and official websites. Since the emulator was open source, copies have been made and hosted on various file sharing platforms. Usually, these copies are given different names to somewhat disassociate itself from the original. One example that has become very popular is Suyu (pronounced "sue you"). These copies mean you can still use Yuzu even though the people that used to make it no longer do. Other people now work on it instead, but people don't like their work because it is very slow.

Features
Yuzu used a network service called Boxcat instead of Nintendo's BCAT dynamic content network.

Yuzu allows the resolution to be changed to that of various resolutions matching or exceeding the Nintendo Switch's capabilities.

In December 2019, Yuzu added an experimental Vulkan renderer to its Early Access build. As of April 2020, this Vulkan renderer is being used with MoltenVK to continue making Yuzu for MacOS because Apple discourages the use of OpenGL in MacOS.

On May 9, 2020, the development team announced an update that included experimental multi-core CPU emulation.

Reception
In October 2018, Kotaku published an article saying Super Mario Odyssey was playable. The author of the article showed concern Yuzu could emulate games that were available commercially at the time.

PC Gamer said Yuzu was able to run Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! shortly after the games came out, but with audio issues.

In October 2019, Gizmodo published an article saying Yuzu could emulate some games at a frame rate at about the same speed as a real Nintendo Switch.

The Nintendo of America sued the company that developed Yuzu. The lawsuit was successful. So, in February 2024, they decided to stop providing this software, cutting a long story short.

Related pages
 Emulator

References

Other websites
 Game compatibility list 

Category:Emulation software