Yuzu is another incredibly promising open source project, emulating the Nintendo Switch which is not exactly a small job (not that emulation ever is) and it's improving at a rapid pace.
Some good news for NVIDIA users came, with some major problems now being solved. Recently NVIDIA dropped support for some older cards, and the driver changes towards it introduced issues for Yuzu. The devs explain "The root of the problem in NVIDIA’s drivers seems to be in negation of integer and floating point values, and bitwise conversions of input values." - but thankfully all known issues have been worked around. As it turns out, what they ended up doing fixes it for Intel too and was also an optimization so they're now doing it for all APIs.
Pictured - Fire Emblem: Three Houses running on Yuzu.
Other big upgrades came like a fix to scenes in games where multiple videos were playing, which would cause them to glitch and flicker. More improvements to their Vulkan support came along fixing and making LEGO® CITY UNDERCOVER playable. Plus, Immortals Fenyx Rising now works but for the moment has some graphical issues. Even more Vulkan improvements came along to help both The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 fix up their broken shadows.
A fun addition has also been added to support gamepad hotkeys. Basically, it allows you to set special functions to gamepad buttons like access or exit fullscreen, unlock the framerate, pause/continue emulation, capture a screenshot and so on. This was done to help "handheld PC users, couch players, and anyone not wanting to reach all the way to their keyboard while playing" - so, Steam Deck?
There's tons more but for Linux users especially, we're getting better Flatpak support. There's video decoding crashes fixed and they implemented support for XDP's Inhibit API to help prevent the screen going to sleep in the Flatpak.
Quoting: JSVRamirezI hope they're smart enough not to advertise it as working on the SteamDeck; it's a first class ticket to Nintendo sending a C&D.At least in the United States, emulators are legal, as long as they don't make use of code from the original implementation. There wouldn't be such a huge proliferation in emulator software if it weren't, and classic titles offered for sale on the Switch even use open source emulators. How you obtain your game/ROM files to run using those emulators is where legality comes into question.
I'm a big user and fan of the Dolphin emulator to play my collection of Gamecube and Wii games on my devices, and mGBA for the same purpose with Game Boy and GBA games. I'm looking forward to installing both on a Steam Deck.
Quoting: ChuckaluphagusQuoting: JSVRamirezI hope they're smart enough not to advertise it as working on the SteamDeck; it's a first class ticket to Nintendo sending a C&D.At least in the United States, emulators are legal, as long as they don't make use of code from the original implementation. There wouldn't be such a huge proliferation in emulator software if it weren't, and classic titles offered for sale on the Switch even use open source emulators. How you obtain your game/ROM files to run using those emulators is where legality comes into question.
While I absolutely agree, Nintendo has shown an intentional disregard for the legality of their actions when it comes to emulators and fan projects (see AM2R) and similar scenarios. Yuzu is fantastic and it's developers should be supported wholeheartedly. Plus, yuzu despite it's proficiency and unparalleled capabilities is very much still in it's "infancy" and a libretro port could slow it's development down. Not arguments I like to make but arguments that need to be made.
Last edited by Calinou on 13 January 2022 at 6:07 pm UTC
Quoting: TrainDocQuoting: JSVRamirezI hope they're smart enough not to advertise it as working on the SteamDeck; it's a first class ticket to Nintendo sending a C&D.
While I absolutely agree, Nintendo has shown an intentional disregard for the legality of their actions when it comes to emulators and fan projects (see AM2R) and similar scenarios.
This was more where I was coming from. Emulators are legal here, too, but Nintendo has form on these kinds of things and fan projects, even where they were entirely new games with a respectful nod to a Nintendo project.
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