theory · software · emulation

Run every console,emulated.

Notes on where console emulation stands: Switch emulation after Ryujinx, the forks that replaced it, what runs well on every other platform, the settings that matter, and the court cases and takedowns behind all of it.

Ryubing guide Emulator roster Legal timeline

Emulate anywhere

An emulator rebuilds one machine's hardware in software so another machine can run its programs. What follows is install paths, release channels, tuning notes, and enough history to explain why half these projects moved off GitHub.

Ryubing — maintained continuation of Ryujinx.
Roster — Eden, Dolphin, RetroArch, PCSX2, Azahar, shadPS4.
Timeline — the legal record, from Connectix to 2026.

SwitchFocus

RyubingEmulator

8+ projectsRoster

Win · Linux · MacPlatforms

Ryujinx history

The original open-source Switch emulator and why development stopped in October 2024.

Ryubing overview

The community fork that carries Ryujinx forward — channels, platforms, and features.

Install & tuning

Downloads, release channels, graphics backends, shader cache, and hardware notes.

Emulator roster

The active projects beyond Switch — Dolphin, RetroArch, PCSX2, Azahar, shadPS4.

Legal timeline

A neutral record of emulation case law and takedowns, from 2000 to 2026.

Glossary

The terms that come up everywhere — JIT, LDN, XCI, NSP, shader cache, keys.

Start here

Information

An emulator rebuilds one machine’s hardware in software so another machine can run its programs. On a desktop, a Switch’s ARM CPU and its GPU end up as translation layers, and how well those layers are written decides whether a game runs at all.

These are our working notes on that, current to 2026. Switch emulation gets the most space because it changed the most: Ryujinx shut down, forks took over, and Nintendo has spent two years sending takedowns. The rest covers the other consoles, the handful of settings that move framerate, and a timeline of the legal decisions everyone keeps citing at each other.

All of it assumes you dump your own games, firmware, and keys. None of the projects below hand those out, and neither do we.

Containers

Docker

The Docker section would be located here

Switch emulation

Ryujinx

Ryujinx was an open-source Switch emulator written in C# on .NET, started in 2017 by the Brazilian developer gdkchan. It booted commercial games first, in 2018, and by mid-2024 it had roughly 3,550 of about 4,300 tested titles rated playable, which made it the accuracy benchmark for the platform. Later years added a Vulkan backend, an Avalonia interface, and a native macOS port that used Apple’s hypervisor to run ARMv8 code with barely any translation cost.

It ended on October 1, 2024, with no warning. Nintendo approached gdkchan and offered an agreement to stop working on the project; the GitHub organization, the downloads, and the Patreon all came down. There was no lawsuit and no public settlement, unlike the Yuzu case eight months earlier. The project went quiet and 1.1.1403 stands as the last official release.

Whatever instructions used to live on this page are dead now. The choco install ryujinx package, the website downloads, the RyuSAK companion — all of it points at the discontinued original. The continuations are where the work happens, and Ryubing is the most complete of them.

The continuation

Ryubing

Ryubing is the fork that carries Ryujinx forward. Its GitHub org describes it without ceremony: “a fork of the discontinued Switch emulator, Ryujinx.” GreemDev, who had worked on the original, started it within days of the October 2024 shutdown as a quality-of-life fork, then rebranded it to Ryubing around the start of 2025.

Compared to where the original left off, Ryubing added:

Built-in LDN multiplayer — local-wireless multiplayer over the internet, previously a separate community build, now integrated with a project-hosted LDN server.
Two release channels — Stable for tested releases and Canary for automatic per-commit builds from the development branch, delivered through a built-in auto-updater.
Broader platform coverage — Windows x64 and ARM64, Linux x64 and ARM64, and a universal macOS build, with a community-maintained Metal backend for Apple Silicon alongside the Vulkan and OpenGL ones.
Quality-of-life tooling — an XCI trimmer, mod and cheat management inherited from Ryujinx, and ongoing performance and compatibility work (including partial SDK20 support so newer game updates like Tears of the Kingdom 1.4.x boot).

Legally it has been a rough two years. Nintendo issued DMCA takedowns against Ryujinx forks in March 2025, and the March 6 notice alone covered 575 repositories, which took Ryubing’s code repository offline. The source moved to a self-hosted Git at git.ryujinx.app; the issue tracker, compatibility list, and support repos stayed on GitHub. GreemDev stepped away after the February 12, 2026 wave, leaving contributor LotP and the rest of the team running it in maintenance mode. Infrastructure, compatibility tracking, and bugfix releases still ship. Big features mostly don’t.

Family tree

The Ryujinx forks, compared

October 2024 split the Ryujinx lineage into several continuations. Where they stand in mid-2026:

Project	Focus	Platforms	Channels	Status
Ryubing	Quality-of-life continuation, LDN multiplayer, Metal backend	Windows, Linux, macOS (x64 + ARM64)	Stable + Canary	Maintenance mode since Feb 2026; self-hosted source
Kenji-NX	Shares most Ryubing changes, keeps the original Ryujinx interface philosophy	Desktop + Android builds	Rolling releases	Active; GitHub repos named in the Feb 2026 DMCA
ryujinx-mirror	Preservation-only hard fork, minor fixes	Windows, Linux, macOS	Nightly	Archived June 6, 2025 — no longer maintained

Ryubing and Kenji-NX cooperate closely and share most of their code. In practice you pick between desktop-first (Ryubing) and Android plus the classic UI (Kenji-NX). Eden and Citron get confused for Ryujinx forks constantly; they aren’t. Both come from the yuzu lineage and appear in the emulator roster below.

Get started

Install

Downloads and documentation live at ryujinx.app, and the setup guide is at docs.ryujinx.app. You pick a channel when you download:

Stable — tested releases. Take this one unless you have a reason not to.
Canary — a build per commit. More fixes and features, and more churn to go with them.

The flow is the same on every platform:

Download the build for your OS and architecture from the Ryubing website.
Extract the archive to a location of your choice.
Launch the emulator and install your dumped Switch firmware, then point it at your prod.keys.
Add your game directory through the settings, select a title, and play.

Nothing in that archive is firmware or keys. You dump both yourself, off a hackable Switch, with Atmosphère and Lockpick_RCM as the setup guide describes. Any third-party site offering bundled “Ryujinx keys” is unofficial, and usually worse than that.

Windows

x64 and ARM64 builds are both provided. The old Chocolatey ryujinx package still tracks the discontinued original, so ignore it, take the archive from the Ryubing site, and let the built-in updater keep it current. Stay on current GPU drivers, since Vulkan is the backend you want.

Linux

x64 and ARM64 archives, plus community packaging like the AUR on Arch. Firmware and keys work the same way.

Mac

The macOS build is a universal binary. On Apple Silicon it runs genuinely well — the hypervisor executes ARMv8 code near-natively, and there’s a Metal backend. Anyone who tried Mac emulation in the original Ryujinx era should try again.

Performance

Tuning

Switch emulation is CPU-bound before anything else, and single-core speed matters far more than core count. Official minimums are 8 GiB of RAM and an OpenGL 4.6-capable GPU. Aim instead for 16 GB, a recent mid-range CPU, and any discrete GPU that speaks Vulkan.

Graphics backend

Vulkan is the recommendation, and close to mandatory on AMD and Intel, whose Windows OpenGL drivers are slow. It compiles shaders faster and costs less CPU time.
OpenGL is worth keeping around as an NVIDIA fallback when one specific title misbehaves under Vulkan.
macOS should stay on Auto. It picks Vulkan through MoltenVK for most titles and the native Metal backend where Metal is known to be better.
Under 4 GB of VRAM, turn on texture recompression. Vulkan wants more video memory than OpenGL did.

Caches

Two caches take care of most stutter, given a little time:

Disk shader cache keeps compiled shaders on disk. The first trip through an area stutters; every trip after doesn’t. Leave it on. If a game starts crashing while loading shaders, purge it from Cache Management in the game list’s right-click menu.
PPTC, the profiled persistent translation cache, saves JIT-translated CPU code and cuts boot and load times. Its profile fills in over the first few launches, so give it a couple of runs before judging.

System options

Memory manager: Host unchecked is the default and the fastest. Step down to Host or Software only when chasing instability.
Hypervisor, Apple Silicon only: runs the game’s ARMv8 code natively instead of translating it, which removes most of the CPU-emulation cost. A few mods are picky and only launch under particular hypervisor and memory-mode combinations.
Anisotropic filtering at 16x is basically free. Resolution scaling is not — past 2x the GPU cost climbs quickly, Vulkan especially.

Handhelds

Steam Deck

Ryubing runs on the Steam Deck, and EmuDeck will install and configure it for you on SteamOS. There’s also a community Flatpak on Flathub, which the Ryubing team is careful to say they don’t officially support.

EmuDeck is in good shape generally. It sets up emulators, the ES-DE frontend, and Steam integration, and it pulls each emulator from its upstream project instead of shipping its own binaries. RetroDECK, the other option, dropped Switch emulation entirely in February 2026 over takedown risk, which leaves EmuDeck as the easier route on the Deck right now.

Configure

Setup

We used to point people at RyuSAK here. It targeted the original Ryujinx and nobody maintains it anymore. The official Ryubing setup guide covers the same ground for a current install: firmware from an XCI or ZIP, where keys go, and per-game configuration.

When a game misbehaves, check the project’s public compatibility tracker on GitHub. Their Discord bot answers the same lookups if you’d rather ask in chat.

Beyond the Switch

Emulator roster

The rest of the landscape, project by project, as of mid-2026.

Eden — Nintendo Switch

Eden sees the most development activity of any Switch emulator right now. Its family tree runs through yuzu: Nintendo’s February 2024 lawsuit killed yuzu, the Suyu fork gave up in February 2025 under takedown pressure, and Citron splintered, with part of its team launching Eden in May 2025. Builds cover Windows, Linux, Android, and macOS, and v0.2.1 landed in June 2026.

Eden was also the only project to file DMCA counter-notices after the February 2026 wave, and it shipped its next release days later off self-hosted infrastructure. Watch out for lookalike sites and APKs claiming to be “3.0” — official versioning is still 0.x and releases come from eden-emu.dev.

Dolphin — GameCube & Wii

Dolphin is the reference emulator for GameCube and Wii and one of the better-run projects anywhere in emulation. It switched to date-based rolling releases in July 2024, starting with 2407, and cuts a dated stable roughly quarterly; 2606 in June 2026 expanded Triforce arcade support and added GameCube Game Boy Player emulation. Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android are all covered. The Steam release was cancelled in 2023 after Nintendo contacted Valve.

RetroArch — everything else

RetroArch is the frontend for the libretro ecosystem: 200-odd emulator cores from the Atari 2600 up through the PS2, all behind one interface, sharing shaders, netplay, and save states. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, consoles, and the browser, and it has been on Steam since 2021 with cores distributed as free DLC. Latest stable is 1.22.2 from November 2025, with nightlies filling the gaps.

PCSX2 — PlayStation 2

PCSX2 started its 2.x era in July 2024 with the Qt interface and has moved fast since. 2.6.0 in January 2026 brought a quicker Vulkan path and a pile of compatibility fixes, and nightlies land close to daily. Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Azahar — Nintendo 3DS

Azahar is what came after Citra, built by merging the PabloMK7 Citra fork with Lime3DS once the March 2024 yuzu settlement shut Citra down. It updates regularly across Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android, Google Play included, and has picked up online multiplayer and Amiibo support along the way. The project also took its legal posture seriously: it requires legitimately dumped keys and dropped the encryption-related code outright. Clone sites exist here too — the real one is azahar-emu.org.

shadPS4 — PlayStation 4

shadPS4 leads PS4 emulation, with releases every six to eight weeks or so (v0.16.0, June 2026). Bloodborne is the showcase: fully playable, benchmarked at 4K60 on high-end hardware, and running on the Steam Deck. Hundreds of other titles sit at playable or in-game on the compatibility list.

EmuDeck — the installer

EmuDeck isn’t an emulator. It installs and configures them on SteamOS, Windows, Linux, and, since March 2026, Android — fetching each one from its upstream project, wiring it into ES-DE and Steam, and applying sane per-device defaults. See the Steam Deck section above.

The record

Legal timeline

No US court has ever held emulator software itself illegal. The fights that matter now are about cryptographic keys, firmware, and ROM distribution, not about the emulator code. The events below are the ones people cite; we’ve tried to record them without taking a side.

2000 — Sony v. Connectix. The Ninth Circuit held that reverse-engineering the PlayStation BIOS to build the Virtual Game Station emulator was fair use, because no Sony code shipped in the final product. This is the precedent everything else rests on.
2000 — Sony v. Bleem. Bleem won the legal argument, since using PlayStation screenshots in comparative advertising was fair use, and still went under by late 2001 because the litigation costs bankrupted a two-person company.
February 26 – March 4, 2024 — Nintendo v. Tropic Haze (yuzu). Nintendo sued yuzu’s developer over DMCA anti-circumvention, citing pre-release Tears of the Kingdom piracy. It settled in a week for $2.4 million and a permanent injunction, and yuzu and Citra both ended the same day.
October 1, 2024 — Ryujinx shuts down. No lawsuit. Nintendo contacted gdkchan, offered an agreement to stop, and the GitHub organization came down. The terms have never been made public.
March 6, 2025 — DMCA against Ryujinx forks. A single notice covering 575 repositories in the ryujinx-mirror network. The argument: using prod.keys is circumvention under 17 U.S.C. §1201, citing the Tropic Haze judgment. Ryubing’s source moved to self-hosted infrastructure.
May 2025 — Nintendo’s EULA update. Ahead of the Switch 2, the account agreement gained language asserting a right to render devices “permanently unusable” for violations, plus an explicit ban on bypassing or decrypting console protections.
June 2025 — Switch 2 launches. Security is substantially harder this time, and emulation researchers put meaningful Switch 2 emulation many years out.
September – October 2025 — individual enforcement. A $2 million consent judgment against Modded Hardware over flashcarts and pre-modded consoles, a $17,500 default judgment against streamer “EveryGameGuru”, and a $4.5 million suit filed against a former r/SwitchPirates moderator.
February 12, 2026 — the mass DMCA wave. One notice, 345 repositories, 13 named Switch emulator projects, including Ryubing, Eden, Citron, Kenji-NX, and MeloNX, all on the same §1201 keys theory. Within the week Ryubing went into maintenance mode, Citron was discontinued (accounts differ on whether Nintendo pressure or internal conflict was the main cause), and Eden filed counter-notices and kept shipping.

The pattern since 2024 is consistent. Nintendo reaches for a §1201 anti-circumvention claim aimed at prod.keys, which avoids ever arguing about the emulator code — the part Connectix protects.

Terminology

Glossary

JIT (just-in-time translation) — recompiling the console’s ARM CPU instructions into native host instructions while the game runs. This is what makes Switch emulation fast enough to be worth doing.
PPTC — profiled persistent translation cache. Saves JIT output to disk so later launches skip the retranslation.
Shader cache — compiled GPU shaders on disk. Kills repeat-visit stutter after the first pass through an area.
LDN — the Switch’s local wireless networking. Ryubing carries it over the internet so local-multiplayer titles work between distant players.
XCI — a raw dump of a game cartridge. NSP is the eShop package equivalent.
prod.keys — the console’s cryptographic keys, needed to decrypt games, dumped from your own hardware, and the center of every legal fight since 2024.
Firmware — the Switch’s OS files, installed into the emulator, also dumped from your own console.
NAND — the console’s internal storage: saves, profiles, installed data. Emulators recreate it as a folder on the host.
Backend — the graphics API the emulator translates console GPU commands into. Vulkan, OpenGL, or Metal.
Core — RetroArch’s term for a single emulator module loaded by the libretro frontend.

Citations

Sources

Where the history and status claims came from:

Ryujinx & Ryubing

Ryujinx — Wikipedia — project history, milestones, compatibility figures, and the October 2024 shutdown.
Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has ceased development — Shacknews — gdkchan’s agreement with Nintendo and removal of the GitHub organization.
Switch emulator Citron is being discontinued and Ryubing enters maintenance mode — GBAtemp — GreemDev’s departure and the February 2026 shift to maintenance under LotP.
Ryubing — GitHub organization — issue tracker, compatibility tracker, and support infrastructure.
Ryubing source — git.ryujinx.app — self-hosted repository, release channels, and changelogs.
Ryubing setup guide — docs.ryujinx.app — official firmware, key, and configuration documentation.
ryujinx-mirror — GitHub — the preservation hard fork, archived June 2025.
Kenji-NX — GitHub — the sibling fork with Android builds.
Vulkan backend — Ryujinx blog and the impossible port: macOS — Ryujinx blog — backend guidance, hypervisor, and Apple Silicon details behind the tuning section.

Legal timeline

Sony v. Connectix — Wikipedia and the US Copyright Office fair-use summary — the 2000 reverse-engineering precedent.
Bleem! — Wikipedia — the comparative-advertising ruling and the company’s 2001 shutdown.
Switch emulator creator settles Nintendo lawsuit for $2.4M — Video Games Chronicle — the Tropic Haze settlement ending yuzu and Citra.
Nintendo DMCA notice, March 6 2025 — github/dmca and Nintendo DMCA notice, February 12 2026 — github/dmca — the primary takedown notices, with repository counts and the §1201 keys theory.
13 Switch emulators hit by latest wave of Nintendo takedowns — Nintendo Life and Nintendo issues DMCA takedown on more Switch emulators — Video Games Chronicle — coverage of both DMCA waves and Eden’s counter-notice.
Citron is gone, but it’s not Nintendo’s fault — Retro Handhelds — the competing account of Citron’s discontinuation.
Nintendo updates its user agreement to crack down on emulation — Nintendo Life — the May 2025 EULA changes.
Nintendo wins lawsuit against pirate streamer — TorrentFreak and Nintendo wins $2M against Switch modding store — Engadget — the 2025 individual-enforcement judgments.

Emulator roster

Eden — official site and self-hosted releases.
Dolphin progress report 2603 — dolphin-emu.org — the rolling-release scheme and recent features.
RetroArch releases — GitHub — version history and platform coverage.
PCSX2 releases — GitHub — the 2.x stable line and nightly cadence.
Azahar — GitHub — the Citra-successor merge and its legal-posture changes.
shadPS4 releases — GitHub — release cadence and compatibility milestones.
EmuDeck SteamOS FAQ and Ryubing on Flathub — Steam Deck availability, including the unofficial-Flatpak caveat.
RetroDECK discontinues Switch emulation support — Steam Deck HQ — the February 2026 RetroDECK decision.

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What is Ryujinx?

Ryujinx was an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator written in C#. Development ended on October 1, 2024, after Nintendo reached an agreement with its creator, gdkchan, to stop the project and remove its GitHub organization and downloads.

What is Ryubing?

Ryubing is the community fork that continues Ryujinx development. It started immediately after the October 2024 shutdown, ships Stable and Canary release channels, and supports Windows, Linux, and macOS, including ARM64 builds.

Where do I download Ryubing?

Downloads and setup guides live at ryujinx.app and docs.ryujinx.app. After a March 2025 DMCA takedown removed the code from GitHub, the source moved to the project's self-hosted Git at git.ryujinx.app.

Does Ryubing include firmware or keys?

No. Like the original Ryujinx, Ryubing does not distribute Switch firmware or prod.keys — you must dump them from your own console. Sites offering bundled keys or firmware are unofficial and best avoided.

Are emulators legal?

Emulator software itself has never been ruled illegal by a US court — Sony v. Connectix (2000) established that a cleanly reverse-engineered emulator is lawful. Distributing copyrighted ROMs, firmware, or cryptographic keys is a separate matter and is the basis of modern DMCA takedowns.

What happened to Yuzu?

Nintendo sued Yuzu's developer Tropic Haze in February 2024; the case settled a week later for $2.4 million, ending Yuzu and Citra the same day. The Suyu fork ceased development in February 2025, while the Eden project remains actively developed.

Which Switch emulator is most active in 2026?

Eden ships the most frequent releases and continued development after the February 2026 DMCA wave. Ryubing remains the maintained Ryujinx-lineage option for desktop, and Kenji-NX publishes Android builds.

Does Ryubing run on Steam Deck?

Yes — EmuDeck lists Ryubing as an installable Switch emulator on SteamOS, and a community Flatpak exists on Flathub, though the Flatpak is not officially supported by the Ryubing team.

Why do games stutter the first time I play them?

The emulator compiles each shader the first time a game uses it, which causes brief stutters. The disk shader cache stores the compiled results, so later sessions in the same areas run smoothly.

Is there a Nintendo Switch 2 emulator?

No. The Switch 2, launched in June 2025, uses substantially hardened security, and emulation researchers have estimated meaningful Switch 2 emulation could take many years. Current projects, including Ryubing, target the original Switch only.