Nintendo Switch Games Successfully Emulated On M1 Macs

The Nintendo Switch is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra chipset, which unlike Intel processors, is based on the ARM architecture. This means, at least in theory, that games playable on the Switch should also be playable on other ARM-based devices, like Apple’s new M1 Mac computers, right?

Yup, that would be correct because according to developer Sera Tonin Brocious, it seems that she has successfully managed to emulate Switch games on an M1 Mac computer. Now before you get too excited, first of all this is by no means an official method of running Switch games, and we’re sure that Nintendo probably won’t be too pleased with the idea.

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I'm so fucking proud of this. It only gets a few frames into the game before it hits the first MoltenVK limitation, but damn. pic.twitter.com/NcLIBLWOPz

— Sera Tonin Brocious (@daeken) December 20, 2020

Secondly, there are limitations to this emulation. While Switch games can be run on an M1 powered Mac computer, there are technical limitations of the MoltenVK runtime library. This means that there’s still a lot of work left to be done before it can even be considered as playable. You can see some of those limitations in the video above.

However, it is still a very impressive port of a Switch game to an M1 Mac, so who knows, maybe down the road there could be an unofficial way for Switch gamers to enjoy their games on their computers instead of the console.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers, Gaming
Tags: m1, Nintendo, nintendo switch