One thing that I really wish one of these emulators would support is VR. The VR support in Zelda and Mario would really shine on a proper VR HMD with VR controllers.
yuzu's theoretically already done the heavy lifting...Vulkan has been the focus for a while. i wonder if yuzu would break MoltenVK in terrible ways, or if it's mostly compatible
I tried to port Yuzu to MacOS. There's still an old PR for it somewhere in the GitHub. I got some 2d games booting.
The main problem is simply that none of the core devs have a mac!
The other big hurdle is the lack of some shader types on metal. For example, geometry shaders are used in Mario, but not available. They'd have to be emulated with compute shaders.
The CPU emulation side is pretty easily compatible.
Emulators are amazing and these progress reports (and Ryujinx's and Citra's and Dolphin's) are great reads. It just feels a bit icky to see them work on current gen consoles. Preservation is important, but focusing on current gen stuff just feels like they're actively catering to pirates rather than just incidentally helping them.
It just feels a bit icky to see them work on current gen consoles.
Nintendo has used legal and illegal bullying to shut down more fan projects and youtube channels than I've pirated games. Until they stop hating the people who love them most, fuck 'em.
By that logic, we'd have a lot more folks working on the less mature 3DS and WiiU emulation scene. That's where we've got aging irreplaceable hardware starting to fail, and many popular games still not playable without hacks or patches.
Nothing "icky" about it. Emulators are alternative compatible implementations of the consoles. They have every right to straight up compete with the real things even on day one. Look into the history of bleem and virtual game station. Back then emulators used to be literally sold on the market and not one of these corporations ever dared to straight up assert that they were illegal. They sued on complete bullshit grounds like comparison screenshots which the courts decided was legal comparative advertising. They even decided that it was fair use to dump the playstation BIOS for the purpose of reverse engineering it to gain access to the unprotected knowledge within.