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Switch emulator Eden is surviving life after Nintendo kicked it off GitHub
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Got Eden on my Steam Deck, runs so good. Nintendo could learn a thing or two tbh.
Emulators are legal, there's enough precedent for that, Nintendo's just butthurt that their games run better on 3rd party emulators than they do on their own hardware.
With the caveat that an emulator cannot copy any copyrighted code to use in the emulation. They try to add as much proprietary code and encryption that it's nearly impossible to emulate without breaking the law.
It's scummy, but people have and will continue to find ways around it. But even the smallest of copyright infringements will result in Nintendo's wrath.
Which is why so many emulators require you to somehow acquire the console's actual BIOS binary yourself (by manually dumping it from your own hardware, of course, and by no other means at all) and drop it into a file folder for the emulator to use.
Even with this they fall back on the god forsaken Digital Millenium Copyright Act (at least in the states). Since they encrypt the system, if you have a key from your own system then it's assumed that you acquired it by violating the DMCA.
It'd be really nice if it was like Wii, where you can have the emulated console do an online system update and bang, there's your whole OS... or failing that, the entire system is on every game disc, just in case... but nooo can't have that.
The problem is, even if you write all the code yourself and require users to dump their own BIOSes and shit, when you get sued by Nintendo, you need the money to be able to hire people to defend yourself. You actually have to prove and most likely convince a judge you're right.
tbf, the Steam Deck's hardware blows the Switch away so of course they play better
That doesn't mean much when it comes to emulation tbh. If the emulator is shit, power won't help.
Yeah but you just compared 3rd party emulators to hardware. Switch isn't running Switch games on emulator, but it's still not surprisingl that an emulator on Steam Deck plays them better.
The Switch is ARM (nvidia tegra x1) while the Deck is x86 (amd zen2?). There's translation involved. Not saying that will guarantee a slowdown, but as @FireWire400 said, if the emulator is shit power won't help much. My oc'ed ryzen 5600x could barely run switch BOTW at 15fps when it first released (though that was arguably still better than the experience I had on my Wii U... shudder)
I'm not sure about good. It somehow runs games a little worse than Yuzu did.
tbf, eden is a new development and pretty young compared to yuzu and how mature it was. at least afaik
I know. But I still find it odd, since Eden is a fork of Yuzu, and not something built from the ground up.
It has no trouble playing Super Mario Wonder at full speed and 1080p, that's good enough in my books.
On my PC, sure. But I was easily playing Switch games on my Deck, which... Well... Performance is lacking.
Huh, runs totally fine on my OLED Deck with the CryoUtilities enhancements.
CryoUtilities. I'm not using that. What does it do?
It's basically a bunch of scripts to tweak performance; you can watch the very good explanation by its creator . It does boost performance quite a bit.
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Hey, you do you.
This sounds like the kind of stuff that breaks Steam Deck software after random system updates, though.
It won't. The most that can happen is that every change gets reverted after a system update.
_