The Open Source community has done it again, and managed to patch Arm64 Linux to run Nintendo Switch Games, with Puyo Puyo Tetris confirmed to work.
The internet is a wonderful thing for gaming. The community usually comes up with incredible ideas, mods, and even full on hoax’s, so the community remains entertained throughout every week. Like the recent Nier: Automata hoax that gripped the internet’s interest for a whole week, gbatemp reported last night, the arm64 Switch emulator has now gained an ‘arm’ up on the competition by being patched to run on the developers’ hardware, within Linux which can run on Mac computers.
While it’s easy to just say arm64 Linux was patched, there are obviously background forces working to make these things a reality, with very sophisticated methods to produce the results that are now widely available for the community. User Worldblender outlines via the original Reddit post on r/linux_gaming.
Over the past while, I’ve worked on-and-off in my free time patching the arm64 Linux kernel to run Nintendo Switch games natively, i.e. by taking many of the Switch’s “Horizon” OS system calls and implementing their behavior using Linux’s existing facilities for memory management, scheduling, synchronization, etc.
– r/linux_gaming post, kentjhall
While the post explicitly states that the fruits of labour are readily available for the public to play with, “This project is far from complete. But I’ve finally gotten to the point where, in addition to a few homebrew demos / games I’ve been testing with, Horizon Linux + mizu is able to run its first commercial game: Puyo Puyo Tetris,” meaning that users are a huge step forward, but there is still work to be done before users will be able to play Nintendo Switch software on Mac hardware. But with things being open source, the community can try and contribute to the project to see it expand in the coming weeks and months.
Fans of emulation can follow each development by following along with the saga on r/linux_gaming for updates and more patch notes.