Oliver Cragg / Android Authority
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TL;DR
- We’ve seen the first Nintendo Switch 2 emulators on Android, although many games aren’t playable.
- We’ve also seen the BananaNative project, which enabled native ports of Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World on Android.
- It’s still early days for these projects, but it’s clear that Switch 2 emulation and native ports are progressing incredibly quickly.
The Nintendo Switch 2 launched just over a year ago, but we weren’t expecting to see emulators or native ports on Android for a while yet. However, that’s exactly what’s happened in recent weeks.
We’ve seen Nintendo Switch 2 emulators landing on various platforms in the last week or two, and they all seem to be ultimately based on the acclaimed Eden emulator for Nintendo Switch 1 titles. Android isn’t left out of the fun, as we’ve also seen Eden SX2A, which is based on the PokeDinner emulator for other platforms. In fact, PokeDinner is in turn based on the so-called Eglantine emulator. And that particular emulator is based on Eden-NS2, which is itself a fork of the original Eden emulator for Nintendo Switch 1 titles. Forking heck.
Nevertheless, Eden SX2A was only an experimental emulator and is no longer being maintained. But the developer lists requirements such as Android 13 or newer, 16GB of RAM (or 12GB for “small” games), and a device with a Qualcomm Adreno GPU (ostensibly a newer chipset). The app even has a “readiness check” to ensure your device meets the requirements. Even if your device exceeds these requirements, preliminary testing shows that games like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza run very slowly. There do seem to be exceptions, though, as Pokemon Pokopia seems to run at playable speeds.
The good news is that there is an Android version of the Eglantine emulator too. Furthermore, the team behind the Eden emulator is now accepting patches for Switch 2 games to run. So it looks like Switch 2 emulation on Android will still see major progress in lieu of Eden SX2A’s abandonment.
There are even unofficial ports of Switch 2 games
What’s even more surprising is that we’re already seeing unofficial fan ports of Nintendo Switch 2 titles like Donkey Kong Bananza (see the video above) and Mario Kart World. The developer behind Eden SX2A has released BananaNative, which is an Android fork of nxtnative for iOS. Either way, this allows users to effectively run Switch 2 games natively on Android.
BananaNative runs a Switch 2 game’s Arm-based code directly on the Android device’s CPU — no CPU code translation or emulation here. The Switch 2’s NVN-based graphics are rebuilt for Vulkan. It’s unclear if this is purely native graphics rendering or translated.
Nevertheless, a video posted by the developer shows very playable performance in Donkey Kong Bananza on a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device with 16GB of RAM and Turnip drivers. It’s worth noting that the developer is using frame generation to achieve these results in the video. Frame generation in general can result in a janky experience if the native frame rate is very low to begin with. So that’s something to keep in mind if you’re excited about running these games on your device. Otherwise, Mario Kart World apparently shows black pixels for now and is effectively unplayable.
Of course, it’s worth stressing that Nintendo Switch 2 emulation and native ports are a bit of a minefield. It’s one thing to emulate older consoles, as many older games aren’t sold anymore, often leaving emulation and native ports as the only way to play them. However, the Switch 2 is Nintendo’s current console, and the games are being actively sold. Either way, don’t be surprised if Nintendo cracks down on all these projects, much like it’s done several times with original Switch emulators.
