Hilarious, after the tortuously long road Xenia took to get there.
Switch’s operating system is based on the OS from 3DS. The ARM architecture was already well documented and emulated. Tegra has documentation from NVidia.
With all that, making a Switch emulator was relatively “easy”. They took Citra, the 3DS emulator, and worked from there.
Xbox 360 is a different beast. Even its OS was only kinda Windows, so they couldn’t just take Wine and a PowerPC emulator and call it a day. Taking long is IMO not much of a surprise because of that.
IIRC the original Xbox has even worse emulation, to this day, despite being infamously close to a stock PC.
What makes RDR’s emulation struggles noteworthy is that it’s a highly desirable game that still took ages to unfuck. Most nightmare cases for emulators seem to be random D-list titles. Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy had incomprehensible crashes, early and reliably, for no discernible reason. True Crime New York on Gamecube was a white whale for Dolphin despite being absolute garbage.
RDR was a huge deal for its own sake - and it ran bad, looked worse, and stayed that way for a while. Back in the day it was common for emulators to only work properly for big-name games. NESticle and SNES9X absolutely cheated to run major titles. Early N64 development was nothing but. So having this killer app refuse to work, year after year, was a lingering presence in people’s minds.
Finally getting it working, only to have a nearly painless alternative drop, is pretty goddang funny.
Aside from poorly documented hardware, one reason why Xbox emulation is in such an early state was simply lack of interest. The Xbox had a meager first-party library and what exclusives there were, were already available to play on every Xbox released ever since via back compat.
I think a more tragic case would be if MGS4 was ever re-released as part of the Master Collection ports. That game was designed from the ground up for PS3, and runs terrible even on the custom RPCS3 builds designed specifically for it.
Yuzu is truly sit that just works
Well, I do own an older Switch that’d be vulnerable to the easy exploits but I gave up when I was supposed to get some joycon-ish device to hack my switch… so “just works” is far from the truth unless I’ve overlooked something.
You don’t need a switch (hacked or otherwise) to use yuzu. The “dump the keys from your own console” stuff is cover-your-ass doctrine, the keys are easily available online
So I’ve been tricked by the Yuzu page that wants to make it seem as if you need a physical console? Dangit!
Yuzu is an emulator. You don’t need a physical console to use it, unless you insist on dumping your own firmware/roms/keys.
Modding actual switch hardware is certainly more involved. Those rcm jigs are annoying, and later revisions require a modchip which is not an easy install.
Hacking a console often involves a bit of work and in some cases that can include physically altering the console. With older Switches you need a PC or Android phone, a USB cable and a little thingy to jump two pins the right Joy-Con rail. There’s a bit of a process to it, but it really isn’t too bad.
Sounds like a lot of misconceptions have been given.
You don’t need to get any weird joycon, you definitely have everything you need. Either a right-joycon or a paperclip.
I’ve done both (and broke my spare JC in the process). I recommend the paperclip. [2:24 tutorial]
What’s simply happening is you’re sending power to a specific pin on your switch. When it gets power and you press the special dev-buttons (Minus-Volume & Power) it goes black and can be exploited with some tech-wizardry.
There’s some cool stuff like themes, homebrew, mods… Been playing Smash Ultimate online for years with mods. However, if you have the means on PC the actual gaming experience over the Switch is typically better and easier to get into.
It’s not that hard, but definitely can be daunting if you’re not too into computers. Really the little RCM jig is just a plastic piece that slides into your right joycon rail and jumps two pins together that basically put it into developer/diagnostic mode. Then you need either a PC, android, or one of the portable payload injectors to get it into the hacked system. From there you can set it up so that it runs a virtual hacked operating system off of an SD card, and you can still boot into the stock firmware without altering your console at all.
It’s relatively easy if you follow instructions and have an early switch. The later model ones do require you physically solder on a modchip, which I wouldn’t have bothered with if I hadn’t bought one of the early switches.
4k 60 fps on my 3080 on day one, its wild.
Yeah but… isn’t that a hollow victory? I mean… every PC that can run RDR on Yuzu can… you know… run RDR natively, right?
