The Challenge Behind Booting Switch Games
Getting to this point hasn't been easy, and has been a massive reverse-engineering challenge. Led by bunnei and Subv with contributions from ogniK and jroweboy the team slowly chipped away at stopping point after stopping point to finally get us to this milestone.
Special thanks to gdkchan and Ryujinx, as without collaboration, this wouldn't have been possible.
Also, huge thanks to Lioncash and MerryMage, who have been tirelessly working on the ARMv8 JIT that yuzu uses! Without it, we'd still be in the dark ages of interpreted CPU emulation.
While yuzu is built on top of Citra's kernel infrastructure, a lot of modification had to be done in order to move things over to the Switch's services. But the main issues all had to do with the Switch's GPU.
Because it's a NVIDIA product, some information was able to be gleamed by sifting through the
Nouveau source. Some of the more particularly difficult stopping points were Kernel Synchronization Primitives and Shader Decompilation, but there were many more smaller bumps along the way. On top of that, the rest of the emulator had to be brought up to snuff in order to get games to the point where they would boot.
In the end, this is a small first step toward proper emulation of Nintendo's exciting console/handheld hybrid. None of the games booting are especially stable and emulation is in a very, very early state.
