Mamma Mia, What-a-Chaos: Nintendo tried to wipe out the Switch emulation scene by cracking down on a popular open source project in 2024. A few years later, the offshoot of this project is capable of running commercial games released for the brand new Switch 2 console. Nintendo’s lawyers will probably get tough, but the Japanese company has only itself to blame for this mess.
A year after Nintendo released the popular Switch 2 console, resourceful developers have already begun bringing the brand new gaming experience to PC through AI-powered emulation. The Eden NX2 emulator can already run popular Switch-exclusive games like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, but there’s still a lot of work to do before compatibility and performance can improve.
Whatever the case, the emulation scene now boasts an impressive list of unprecedented milestones on slot machines old and new. Developer “Takoroka” explained that Eden-NX2 is a fork of the Eden emulator with experimental Switch 2 support. The emulator was released a few days ago and Nintendo enthusiasts are providing plenty of video evidence that Switch 2 emulation on PC has officially become a reality.
How did developers turn a brand new console into a virtual gaming experience in such a short time? In this particular case, AI-powered coding is only part of the equation. Nintendo mostly retained the same basic hardware architecture and operating system as the original Switch, making life much easier for code hackers.
— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) October 30, 2026
According to the people working on the Switch 2, updating existing Switch emulators to support the latest console is simply a matter of adding some new Arm64 CPU instructions to the program’s dynamic recompiler. Existing rendering engines based on the Vulkan API are mostly compatible with the Switch 2 graphics architecture, and the same goes for audio rendering.
The Switch has never been a particularly powerful machine, and existing emulators can now run many commercial games with excellent performance – even on older PC systems. As for the Switch 2, the experimental Eden NX2 build still requires a fairly powerful CPU and GPU combination to render compatible games somewhat playable.
Eden is a powerful Switch emulator born out of the Yuzu disaster. Nintendo tried to stamp out Switch emulation by threatening the Yuzu team through its well-funded legal team, but open source projects only stay dead when their code becomes unmaintainable or no one cares about them anymore. Eden, Suyu, Ryubing and other active branches of the original programs are making rapid progress, even as Nintendo is willing to let the lawyers go when it comes to protecting its gaming IPs.
As the Eden NX2 case clearly shows, it could be the same with the Switch 2. Although the new hybrid console is still early in its commercial lifespan, it has already been jailbroken. Modding, reverse engineering, game dumping and emulation can only be improved at this point.
