When the Nintendo Switch was released in 2017, its custom NVIDIA Tegra X1 chip was already outdated. Many Android and x86 gaming handhelds in the past eight years have had enough power to emulate the most graphically intensive Switch games, thanks to Ryujinx and Yuzu. Nintendo has been mostly silent for years, but last year they went on a DMCA spree, taking down the top Switch emulators, and now the reason is clear.
After the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, the company released a series of articles and videos titled “Ask the Developers.” It turns out that Nintendo is doing something similar to what they are trying to stop everyone else from doing. Following an interview with Nintendo’s Kouichi Kawamoto and Takuirho Dohta on backward compatibility with Switch games, it was revealed that the Switch 2 relies on a different architecture than its predecessor, making it complicated to play original games on the new console.
Dohta mentioned that using software emulators to make the Switch 1 games run on the Switch 2 would drain the battery quickly due to the power requirements of the new NVIDIA chip. To address this issue, Nintendo introduced a translation layer to ease the load, similar to Apple’s Rosetta and Microsoft’s Prism layer.
As for playing Switch 2 games, Nintendo introduced a Game Key Card system where physical cartridges act as keys to download the games from the cloud. This method is not only an anti-emulation measure but also due to the limited 64GB capacity of the Switch 2 cartridges, compared to the 256GB built-in storage in the console.
It will be interesting to see how Switch 2 emulation progresses on non-Nintendo hardware like Android handhelds. Despite Nintendo’s crackdown on emulators, there may still be opportunities for emulation in the future. However, with the release of the Switch 2 on the horizon, there may be a lull in emulation efforts until then.